flffi 




Class. 

Book 



COPXRiGOT DEPOSIT, 



r 



THE TYPES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

UNDER THE GENERAL EDITORSHIP OF 

profe&jor William 2C. Jfreiyon 



THE POPULAR BALLAD. By Professor Francis B. Gummere 

of Haverford College. 
THE LITERATURE OF ROGUERY. By Professor F. W. 

Chandler of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. 

IN PREPARATION 

THE PASTORAL. By Professor Jefferson B. Fletcher of 
Columbia University. 

THE ALLEGORY. By Professor William A. Neilson of Har- 
vard University. 

THE ESSAY. By Ferris Greenslet, Ph.D. 

LITERARY CRITICISM. By Professor Irving Babbitt of 
Harvard University. 

THE SHORT STORY, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN. By Pro- 
fessor W. M. Hart of the University of California. 

THE MASQUE. By Professor J. W. Cuuliffe of McGill Uni- 
versity. 

THE TRAGEDY. By Professor A. H. Thorndike of Columbia 
University. 

THE LYRIC. By Professor Felix E. Schelling of the University 
of Pennsylvania. 

THE SAINTS' LEGENDS. By G. H. Gerould, Preceptor in 
Princeton University. 

CHARACTER WRITING. By Chester N. Greenough, Ph.D., 
Instructor in Harvard University. 

THE NOVEL By Professor J. D. M. Ford of Harvard Uni- 
versity. 

Each square i6mo. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York 



€ije £ppC0 of €ngii$f> literature 

EDITED BY 

WILLIAM ALLAN XEILSON 



THE POPULAR BALLAD 

BY 

FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 



THE POPULAR BALLAD 



BY 
FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HAVERFORD COLLEGE. 

AUTHOR OF " THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY," 

" HANDBOOK OF POETICS," ETC., ETC. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

<$hz ftteqjide J&re$& Cambridge 

1907 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cooies Received 

MAY 11 i9or 

a .Copyright Entry 
/ Tp^ 3o,/ ? ,7 
CLASS /\ XXc., No, 

COPY B. 



' ?M \3l 1 






COPYRIGHT I907 BY FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published May iqo? 



TO 
A. M. G. 



CONTENTS 

Prefatory Note by the General Editor ... ix 

Preface xv 

Chapter I. The Ballad : Definition and Origins. 

I. THE MEANING OF "POPULAR." — Minstrels and jour- 
nalists — Definition by origins 1-16 

II. COMMUNAL AUTHORSHIP. — Poetry of the People and 
Poetry of Art — The history of poetry conceived as a 
pyramid — Primitive chorals .......... 16-28 

III. COMMUNAL POETRY OTHER THAN BALLADS. 

The question restated — The broken bridge — Early 
Germanic chronicle, lyric, epic — Improvisation — Records 
of communal song — Proof of origin so far incomplete . 28-61 

W. SPECIFIC MARKS OF THE BALLAD. — No primitive 
ballads preserved — Effect of oral tradition — Imperson- 
ality — The narrative test 61-71 

V. THE BALLAD STRUCTURE. — Structure the essential 
fact — Other tests — Improvisation — Refrain — Situa- 
tion to narrative — Dialogue 71-85 

VI. CHORAL AND EPIC ELEMENTS. — The split situa- 
tion — Repetition — Ritual and myth — Origins in the 
dance — The epic process — The situation ballad . . 85-117 

VII. INCREMENTAL REPETITION AS FINAL PROOF OF 
POPULAR ORIGIN. — Situation and repetition — The 
relative-climax — Incremental repetition the original 
pattern of balladry 117-134 

Chapter II. The Ballads: Classification. 

I. THE OLDEST GROUPS. — Riddle ballads — Flytings — 
Domestic complications — Stolen brides — Ballads of the 
dance — Elopements 135-166 



viii CONTENTS 

II. BALLADS OF KINSHIP. — Bewick and Graham — The 
mother-in-law — The filial relation — Jealousy — Adul- 
tery — Fidelity — The tragic conflict — The Braes of 
Yarrow — Betrayal — Child Waters ....... 166-207 

III. THE CORONACH AND BALLADS OF THE SUPER- 

NATURAL. — Coronachs — Good-nights — Jonah bal- 
lads — Fairy ballads — Preternatural ballads — Trans- 
formation — Ghosts 207-223 

IV. LEGENDARY BALLADS. — Classical and sacred tradi- 

tion — The Bitter Withy — Minstrel ballads and ribaldry 

— Humor — Ballads of the sea — Mary Hamilton . . 223-243 

V. THE BORDER BALLADS. — Singing and saying — Border 
raids — Ballads of battle — Otterbum and Cheviot — 
Chronicle ballads 243-266 

VI. THE GREENWOOD BALLADS. — Outlaws — Robin 

Hood, his ballads and his epic 266-285 

Chapter III. The Sources of the Ballads. 

Tradition — The problem of sources — Transmission and 
distribution — Coincidence or derivation to explain com- 
mon traits? — Folklore in the ballads — Stock phrases — 
Conventional elements — Fusion of ballads — Texts — 
Collectors — Editors — Forgers — Imitators — Original 
element 286-321 

Chapter IV. The Worth of the Ballads. 

Cumulative appeal as opposed to individual suggestion — 
Taine's formula — Convention in balladry — Metre and 
diction — Figurative power — Nature — The objective 
note in balladry — Contrast with art — The characters of 
the ballad — Its final value — Tragedy to the fore — The 
voice of the people 322-345 

Bibliographical Notes 346 

Ballads cited or quoted 351 

Index 355 



PREFATORY NOTE 

BY THE GENERAL EDITOR 

The extent of English Literature is now so vast that a 
comprehensive and scholarly treatment of it as a whole 
has almost ceased to be regarded as a task within the 
scope of a single writer. Collaboration has, accordingly, 
been resorted to more and more; and the method of 
collaboration hitherto employed has been to assign to 
each of a group of scholars a chronological period. This 
is, of course, a natural and useful principle of division. 
It brings out clearly the relation of the spirit of contem- 
porary life to the literature of a period ; and the consid- 
erations it involves will always be of prime importance. 
But it has certain serious defects. The separation of 
periods tends to exaggerate the differences between them, 
and to obscure the essential continuity of literary history. 
The Middle Ages, for example, are frequently treated 
as a static period, and the Renaissance is described as if 
the tendencies which characterized it began abruptly. 
The gradual nature of the transition is ignored, as is the 
fact that the roots of much that is regarded as exclusively 



x PREFATORY NOTE 

of the Renaissance are to be found in the intellectual life 
of Europe for centuries before. Further, the persistence 
and development of literary forms and modes of thought 
cannot be justly exhibited in a scheme which of necessity 
interrupts them at what are often arbitrary points. 

The purpose of the series of which the present is the 
initial volume is to attempt the division of the field along 
vertical instead of horizontal lines. It is proposed to 
devote each volume to the consideration of the charac- 
teristics of a single formal type, to describe its origins 
and the foreign influences that have affected it, and to 
estimate the literary value and historical importance of 
all the chief specimens that have been produced in Eng- 
land and America. Biographical detail, except when it 
has a bearing upon the modification of the type, will be 
omitted, as sufficiently dealt with in the current manuals; 
but bibliographies of the earliest and of the best accessible 
editions of the works concerned will be given, as well as 
of the more valuable criticism. It is designed to include 
all the important literary species, so that the series as a 
whole will constitute a fairly comprehensive survey of 
the contents of our literature. 

The advantages to be gained by this method of ap- 
proach are obvious. It will be possible — for the first time, 
save in the case of one or two popular forms — to view 



PREFATORY NOTE xi 

the history of the growth, variations, and intermixtures 
of the genres of English Literature, disentangled from 
the mass of biographical and other detail which at present 
obscures the course of their development, and even their 
essential nature. It will bring into view forms which have 
an unmistakable identity, and which have had at times 
a remarkable vogue, but which have suffered partial 
eclipse from the accident of not having been employed 
by any writer of the first magnitude. It will reveal an 
unexpected flourishing of other forms in periods when 
they have been supposed to have practically disappeared. 
Thus the Picaresque is generally regarded as having 
culminated in the eighteenth century in writers such as 
Defoe and Smollett, while on more minute investigation 
it is found to be extremely active at the present moment, 
and to have recently produced at least one interesting 
new variety. Finally, one may fairly hope that the tak- 
ing account of our literature along these lines will be 
an important step towards preparing material for that 
comparative study from which is to be expected the 
next great advance in our understanding of literary 
phenomena. The comparative method will indeed be 
employed in these volumes in the discussion of origins 
and influences ; but beyond this one may discern a pos- 
sibility for large and fruitful generalizations, when a 



xii PREFATORY NOTE 

similar ordering of the material shall have been made 
in the other European literatures. 

The difficulties of the undertaking need not be ignored. 
The defining of the type and the setting of it apart from 
its nearer relatives, the contamination of types, the dis- 
solving of the definable form into a mere pervasive 
mood, the necessity of discussing a work from one point 
of view at a time, leaving others to be dealt with in later 
volumes, — these and many similar problems will call for 
much exercise of judgment on the part of the individual 
authors. But it will often be in the working out of just 
such problems that most illumination will be cast upon 
aspects and relations hitherto ignored. The compre- 
hensive treatment of some great works which have been 
the culminating points of previous histories is not here 
to be expected. Thus " The Faerie Queene " must be 
viewed as a link in the history, at one time, of Allegory, 
at another, of Romance, at another, of Didactic Poetry. 
But the sacrifice of one kind of unity and comprehen- 
siveness thus entailed will be compensated for by the 
light thrown from new angles; and it is a sacrifice of 
something already frequently attempted. 

The division of the whole body of a literature into con- 
stituent genres presents greater difficulties in the case of 
English than in the case, say, of French. English writers 



PREFATORY NOTE xiii 

have been less accustomed than French to view their 
work as belonging to specific types, have been, on the 
whole, less conscious of form as such, more concerned 
with a subject-matter or a message. But to admit this 
is not to deny that the forms have been there, and 
have reacted powerfully, if silently, upon content. The 
extent to which this is true can be determined better 
at the close of our labors than at the beginning. 

So also must we postpone till the work is nearer com- 
pletion the much debated question of the evolution of 
genres, v and the validity in this discussion of the biological 
analogy. No attempt in the present direction has yet been 
made on a scale sufficiently large to justify dogmatism 
as to the presence or absence of a clearly definable curve 
of evolution in the life-history of literary forms in English. 
A number of terms that seem to imply a belief in such a 
formal evolution have passed into the language -of current 
criticism, and will doubtless appear in these studies. But 
the opponents of this theory may regard such terms as 
merely convenient figures of speech, not committing the 
writer to a prejudgment of the case for the debating of 
which he is at present only collecting evidence. What 
cannot be denied is the usefulness of segregating for 
purposes of special study the examples of the various 
literary types, and of the attempt to gather from these 
their essential characteristics, the modifications they 



xiv PREFATORY NOTE 

undergo from age to age and author to author, the 
nature and degree of the excellence of each in its kind, 
and their importance in the history of literature re- 
garded both as a form of beauty and as a revelation 
of the human spirit. And this is the main purpose of 
these volumes. 



PREFACE 

Gentle readers are advised to begin their reading of 
this book with the second chapter. The first chapter is 
for those who would quicken their faith in the ballad as 
an independent type of literature, as well as for those 
who wish to have all the conceded'facts before their eyes. 
It must not be regarded, however, as a chapter of con- 
troversy, as canine, — if one may borrow the notion 
of an old English don who is quaintly said to have had 
"no tolerance for dogs, doubting their powers of self- 
restraint." 

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the constant and help- 
ful interest of Professor W. A. Neilson, the general editor 
of this series; to recall the encouragement, unfailing 
and unwearied for fifteen years, of Professor G. L. Kit- 
tredge; and to remember that these men, like the present 
writer though to so much better purpose, once learned 
the lore of ballads from Francis James Child. 

F- B. G. 

Haverford, March, 1907. 




THE POPULAR BALLAD 

CHAPTER I 
THE BALLAD 

I. THE MEANING OF " POPULAR " 

j|N January of 1678 Fontenelle sent to the 
Mercure his " Description of the Empire of 
Poetry." A great country, he calls it, and, 
for the main part, densely peopled. "Like 
most of our provinces, it is divided into Upper and 
Lower Poetry;" of the former, Epic is "the chief city" 
and Tragedy a lofty mountain range, while in the other 
district, the low countries, which are full of marsh, Bur- 
lesque is the capital town. Comedy, to be sure,, "has a 
far more agreeable site; but it is uncomfortably near Bur- 
lesque." Between Upper and Lower Poetry are "vast 
solitudes," the region of good sense, little inhabited, 
though boasting an admirable soil. Two rivers water 
this vast empire; one is the river of Reason, and the 
other is called Rime, rising at the foot of the Mountains 
of Dream (reverie). There is an obscure Forest of Fus- 
tian; and far to the north are towns like Acrostic and 
Anagram. Well out in the sea are an Isle of Satire, 
and an Archipelago of Bagatelles containing number- 
less little islands, — "des madrigaux, des chansons, des 



2 THE BALLAD 

impromptu." And that is all. One searches Fontenelle's 
empire of poetry in vain for anything that could answer 
to the title and the purpose of this present book, for any 
glimpse of what one now calls the popular ballad. 

True, the popular ballad, or rather popular song, had 
been discovered and named, a century before Fontenelle's 
day, by one of his own countrymen. Montaigne had 
opened critical eyes to the fact that poetry might exist 
independent of books and of written records, had com- 
pared savage verse with the songs of French peasants, 
and had praised for the first time what he was first to call 
"poetry of the people." But it is not on Fontenelle's map, 
the new world of poetry; and even in this day there are 
critics who see no necessity for assigning to popular bal- 
lads a specific and clearly bounded portion of the poetic 
globe. If one says, as one does say, that the popular 
I ballad is a poem meant for singing, quite impersonal 
in manner, narrative in material, probably connected in 
its origins with the communal dance, but submitted to 
a process of oral tradition among people who are free 
from literary influences and fairly homogeneous in char- 
acter, one cannot be sure of general assent. There is no 
subject on which men offer theories with such confi- 
dence as on questions about the origins and beginnings 
of poetry; and the origins of the ballad have been de- 
bated almost beyond belief. Every one of the statements 
just made might meet a challenge; and the challenge 
cannot be ignored. The statements must all be proved, 
or at least made reasonable, by facts. The facts, again, 



DEFINITION OF "POPULAR" 3 

must be rightly applied; and one is reminded of Rous- 
seau's pious wish that two men, one very rich and one 
very wise, should together go round the w r orld and study 
the human race. Just such a partnership of information 
and inference ought to be formed in a field of research 
where the capital and complementary faults have pre- 
vailed of collecting material without formulating a theory 
of what the ballad is, and of formulating theories about 
the ballad without intelligent use of the material. Diffi- 
culties begin with the mere nomenclature of the subject. 
It is not only what are popular ballads ; but what is a " bal- 
lad," and what is "popular"? Popular is something 
which pertains to the people at large, and ballad is a song , 
to which folk used to dance; yet nearly every variety of 
short poem in English has been called a ballad, from the 
translated songs of Solomon, " the Ballad of Ballads," 
through stirring lays in love or adventure and cheery 
lyrics of emotion, down to those feats in journalistic 
verse which filled the times of great Elizabeth with tales 
of a "monsterous pygge" or forecast of an earthquake. 1 
Here, indeed, the danger of definition begins; for they 
were "popular" enough, these ballads in print, as 
Shakespeare bears witness, pouring sufficient satire on the 
news "but a month old" which they scattered abroad. 
His usurer's wife and his lyrical fish 2 need not bring 

1 The shepherd "lighteth no sooner on a quagmire, but he thinketh 
this is the foretold earthquake whereof his boy hath the Ballett." — 
Nashe, Anatojny of Absurdity, ed. Grosart, i, 33. 

2 Winter's Tale, iv, iii. 



4 THE BALLAD 

confusion into the case; but there were also printed 
ballads about great men and great events, which, along 
with the pedler or minstrel who sang them, and that 
forerunner of the Grub-Street brotherhood who made 
them, must be disentangled from popular ballads of the 
traditional and unsophisticated kind. Tom Nashe 
would have "the acts of the ventrous and the praise of 
the vertuous ... by publique edict prohibited by such 
men's mouths to be so odiouslie extolde," and rails 
again and again at these "ragged rimes shuffled or 
slubberd up" by some "stitcher, weaver, spendthrift or 
fidler." Such ballads in print began to appear in England 
about the middle of the sixteenth century, 1 and by its 
concluding decades were sold in thousands; they are not 
quite the same quality as those popular songs made in 
Paris and sung through the streets in the days of Mme. 
de Sevigne, 2 which were called vers du Pont-Neuf or 
ponts-neufs outright. Ponts-neufs, although in the jour- 
nalistic manner, have a more communal note, and were 
sung by crowds, rather than read by the 'prentice or shep- 
herd's boy. Still, the line is not easy to draw; with the 

1 The oldest printed ballad of this sort now known in English is said 
to be Skelton's Ballade of the Scottish Kynge, in black letter of about 
1513; although the Gest of Robyn Hood, based on ballads, was probably 
printed soon after 1500. The actual street ballads begin about 1540. For 
earlier popular songs of the satirical and political order which were cir- 
culated in manuscripts, see such collections as Wright's Political Poems 
and Songs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, — e. g. ii, 224, where, about 1449, Talbot 
is sung as a dog and the Earl of Suffolk as a fox "drevin to hole." 
With this "ballad" cf. Child, no. 166, The Rose of England. 

2 Lettres (Grands Ecrivains), i, 480, note 4. 



EARLY PRINTED BALLADS 5 

journalism of the Elizabethan ballad-press was mixed a 
deal of popular songs, reputable and disreputable, and 
even, as the Register of the Stationers' Company can 
show, here and there a traditional ballad of Robin Hood. 
Songs made in the city, like the jingles of a modern con- 
cert-hall, got into the country, and could serve as a charm 
for every poor milkmaid to "chant and chirpe" under 
her cow and so "let down" the milk. 1 Some of these 
songs, we know, were pretty enough; but the ballad 
of commerce tended to be scurrilous and lewd. Henry 
Chettle, in his "Kind-Hart's Dreame," gives a vivid 
picture of the singing and selling of ballads in Essex." 
One Barnes and his two sons are described, these in their 
" ballad-shambels " or booth, the old man outside leaning 
on his crab-tree staff; the sons, "one in a squeaking 
treble, the other in an ale-blown base, carowle out . . . 
adultrous ribaudry." If there is any one line of ihe song 
worse than the rest, says Chettle, "that with a double 
repetition is lowdly bellowed," as, for example, — 

" He whipt her with a foxes taile, Barnes Minor, 
He whipt her with a foxes taile, Barnes Major, 

'O brave boies,' saith Barnes Maximus. The father 
leapes, the lubers roare, the people runne, the divell 
laughs, God lowers, and good men weepe." Apparently 
Chettle bewails the further degeneration of a degenerate 
art; for in his dream Anthony Now-now, "an od old 

1 See Whimzies (1631), a curious pamphlet which hits off in alpha- 
betical order the "characters" of London from almanack-maker down 
to zealous brother. This is on the ballad-monger, pp. 8-15. 



6 THE BALLAD 

fellow . . . with a round cap ... a side-skirted tawney 
coate . . . and leather buskins," after playing on his 
treble violl, sign of his profession, a " huntsup," sends 
messages to the "arch-overseers of the ballad-singers in 
London and elsewhere," lamenting abuses of the ballad 
press unknown in his day. But better or worse, these 
fellows who now hawked about the printed ballad, and 
now sang the scurrilous and lewd songs which Chettle 
cites, are responsible for none of the material with which 
we are concerned. 

Even the minstrel of more romantic associations had 
nothing to do with the making of those typical ballads 
of tradition which form the bulk and give the quality in 
any collection of note. Minstrels before the Conquest, 
court poets like Deor and wanderers like Widsith, are 
out of the question. One glance at Elizabethan pam- 
phlets is enough to fix the standing of that "rogue by act 
of Parliament," the ballad-singer; and what he was and 
what he sang in later time is even more decisive against 
his claims to traditional balladry. Before Elizabethan 
days, to be sure, in what is called the transition period, 
he was a far more important personage. He made money 
now and then. 

" Here lyeth, under this marbyll ston 
Riche Alane, the ballid man ..." 

runs a mocking epitaph which Wright and Halliwell put 
in the fifteenth century. But rich Allans had nothing to 
do with verse beloved and sung by the people; they were 
in a better trade, and dealt in more costly stuff. Warton 



THE MINSTREL 7 

gives from monastery records a long list of gratuities to 
minstrels; and he thinks that "some of our greater 
monasteries kept minstrels of their own in regular pay/' 
precisely as the lords and landed gentry kept them, and 
even the towns. 1 There are gifts "to Lord Stafford's 
mimes," as well as to "the mimes of Rugby." But this 
association of minstrels with the castle and the convent, 
with the aristocracy of wealth and power and with the 
aristocracy of learning, is even more fatal to their con- 
nection with ballads than the proof of minstrel ribaldry 
and a degenerate art. Minstrels, with loose folk of all 
sorts, haunted the old fairs, as in the story of Earl 
Randolph and his friends from Chester. They may have 
ministered to popular mirth, these wandering players, 
but they evidently affected strange ways, strange speech, 
an esoteric craft, and doubtless despised such homely 
traditional songs as the people sang at their village 
dances and over their daily round of toil. It is significant 
when Robert Brunne says that he writes his Chronicle 
"in symple speche" and "for the luf of symple men," 
but not for disours, seggers, and harbours, who were evi- 
dently fond of "strange Inglis." Humble or exalted, 
minstrels inclined to the modern, the difficult, and the 
elaborate, in song. It is true that knights of the thirteenth 
century disguised themselves as minstrels when they 

1 Minstrel, as a later official term, must often mean a performer on 
musical instruments, town piper, or what not. John Selden's father, 
says Wood, was "a sufficient plebeian and delighted much in music." 
The parish register of West Tarring has "John, the sonne of John 
Selden, the minstrell." See Arber, Selden's Table Talk, p. 3. 



8 THE BALLAD 

wished to spy, very much as Hind Horn, in the ballad, 
disguised himself as a beggar; it was going to the other 
extreme from knighthood. Yet both had the grace of 
song. When Johan de Raunpaygne, in the story of 
Fulk Fitz-Warine, takes this disguise, he goes in "very 
poor dress " and carries a great staff. For his good news 
he gets a cup of silver, but for a show of temper is nigh 
to be hanged. When his news turns out false, the noble 
victim remarks that all minstrels are liars. Johan's most 
remarkable feat, however, is his appearance before the 
king as a negro minstrel, — " blacked all over except 
his teeth." Here he carries a tabor to accompany his 
songs; and it is noteworthy that afterwards, in his true 
part as knight at a joust in France, entering the lists, 
he strikes this tabor so that mount and vale resound, and 
the very horses show their joy. The point is, that knight 
and minstrel had the same poetic dialect. 

It is needless, however, to dwell on the life of minstrels 
at this time; it is clear that they are not responsible for 
the ballads. Banned by the Church, alternately petted 
and reviled by the lords and knights whom they amused, 
they practiced every art of the entertainer, and whether 
in poor or rich estate were at the farthest possible re- 
move from the unlettered and artless simplicity which 
marks genuine ballads of tradition. * Professor Kittredge 

1 The woman ballad-singers of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries need no investigation. There is a chap-book in the Bod- 
leian library which purports to give the "confessions" of one of them. 
Her medieval prototype may be seen in the old manuscript illustra- 
tions. 



MINSTREL AUTHORSHIP UNTENABLE 9 

thus sums up the case in a proposition, as he says, hardly 
to be "controverted by any scholar who is familiar with 
the subject. — It is capable of practically formal proof 
that for the last two or three centuries the English and 
Scottish ballads have not, as a general thing, been sung 
and transmitted by professional minstrels or their re- 
presentatives. There is no reason whatever for believing 
that the state of things between 1300 and 1600 was 
different, in this regard, from that between 1600 and 
1900 — and there are many reasons for believing that it 
was not different." He goes on to show that what the 
minstrels did compose was work of an order totally 
different from ballads. 

Not the vocation of minstrels, but household and com- 
munal memory, has been the source of nearly all genuine 
ballads of tradition. John Aubrey's words are seldom 
quoted in full about that ancient way. Speaking of 
old wives' tales, he remarks that "before Woomen were 
Readers, y e history was handed down from mother to 
daughter. ... So my nurse had the history of the Con- 
quest down to Carl I. in ballad;" and two pages later he 
quotes "what my nurse was wont to sing" from a ballad 
about Rosamond. This is the old trail; but women are 
all readers now, the schoolmaster has long been abroad, 
and folk take the literary highroads. Mr. Thomas Hardy 
gives the hint of this "end of an auld sang" in his ac- 
count of the mother Durbeyfield singing ballads which 
daughter Tess, with her superior board-school culture, 
disdains. It is natural to think of minstrels carrying 



10 THE BALLAD 

ballads from land to land. Here is far-come stuff; there 
is the far-come carrier. Minstrels, one shows, carried 
this or that ballad from Germany to Sweden; one con- 
cludes that the ballad itself, the ballad habit, has been 
so imported. But common sense refuses to turn the 
primary instincts of verse and song and dance into a 
commodity first made nobody knows where and then 
distributed over Europe by these literary bagmen. So 
we come back to the vital question and the real facts : not 
only is it impossible to connect the traditional ballads 
with minstrel authorship, but we find that they belong 
demonstrably and absolutely to the people. That it 
was not the people who took and sang the minstrel's 
ditty, but rather the minstrel who intruded upon popular 
tradition, one learns from those "evening dances" of 
the young folks about village lindens or on open town 
squares in Germany, where girls offered the garland and 
youths improvised songs for the prize. Harmless enough 
at first, the custom came into disrepute and was for- 
bidden by laws of the sixteenth century, which provide 
that professional singers, spielleute, who "help" in these 
dances, shall be imprisoned. 

So the minstrel is ruled out of court. At first sight it 
seems that a better case can be made for the journalists 
themselves. Who made the ballad of occasion that Fal- 
staff had in mind, Helena of "All 's Well," poor Pamela 
in Richardson's novel, and perhaps great Roland him- 
self when he exhorted his men to fight so that no "bad 
songs " should be sung about them ? These songs made 



THE JOURNALISTIC BALLADS 11 

history. Selden, talking of libels as straws which tell the 
way of the wind when "casting up a stone does not," 
remarks that "more solid things do not show the com- 
plexion of the times so well as ballads." Or, on the other 
side of the account, and as with newspapers of to-day, 
while half the world tried to keep out of ballads, doubt- 
less the other half tried to get in. Note the appeal 1 
of Geordie's wife, after she has saved her husband from 
the block : — 

" ■ Gar print me ballants weel,' she said, 

* Gar print me ballants many, 

&ar print me ballants weel,' she said, 

* That I am a worthy ladie ' " — 

which may be a corruption of the wife's real remark, but 
shows sufficiently the current feeling in the case. Suppose 
that Geordie's wife really was printed in this way! Here 
is the ballad. Who made it? Why should the journalists 
not have celebrated such folk as well as the typical "cat 
that looked out of a gutter " ? Among all the printed 
ballads, why could not this or that hit upon a traditional 
theme and give it adequate expression? If Dekker, for 
example, arrant playwright and man of the city, could 
write the sweetest and most rural lyric of his time, why 
not assume a few popular ballads of the best sort from 
that early Grub Street? Isaak Walton's "cleanly" room 
in " an honest alehouse " had " twenty ballads stuck about 
the wall." The milk-woman who sang Kit Marlowe's 
song for Piscator, named also "Chevy Chace" and 
1 Child, no. 209, B, 30. 



12 THE BALLAD 

" Johnny Armstrong" in her list. Captain Cox had " great 
oversight ... in matters of storie;"he collected "histo- 
ries " like "Robinhood, Clim of the Clough, the King and 
the Tanner, and the Nutbrown Maid," and "ballets and 
songs" like "Broom, broom on hill . . . Bony lass upon a 
green . . . and a hundred more he hath, fair wrapt up in 
parchment." - Are we to make arbitrary divisions? To 
this, of course, we reply that many traditional ballads were 
printed for the broadside press. But there is a closer 
thrust to parry. Two of the traditional and popular 
pieces which are found in Child's collection were actu- 
ally printed, along with occasional but original verse, in 
Tom Deloney's "Jacke of Newbery," 2 a prose tale. 
Why not assume that Deloney made them ? Now it 
is just here that the genuine ballad of the people vin- 
dicates its popular source as well as its popular vogue. 
Nobody can uphold even the probability that Deloney, 
the "ballating silk- weaver," as Nashe called him, whose 
undoubted work lies before us in much doggerel and a 
piece or so of some literary merit, 3 composed these two 
ballads printed in his tale. It is not merely because he 
says of "Flodden Field" that "the Commons of Eng- 

1 See Laneham's Letter from Kenil worth, 1575, in FurnivalTs Cap- 
tain Cox, Ballad Society Publications, London, 1871. 

2 Historie of John Winchcombe, otherwise called, etc., etc. — See the 
reprint of R. Sievers in Palaestra, xxxvi, Berlin, 1904, pp. 184, 195. 
Sievers concedes a possibility of Deloney's authorship of Flodden Field, 
but balks absolutely at such a case for the Fair Flower of Northumber- 
land. "Beyond question," he says, "we have here to do with a genuine 
popular ballad of the north country." Page 121. 

3 The Spanish Lady's Love is still a favorite. 



DELONEY'S BALLADS 13 

land made this Song, 1 which to this day is not forgotten 
of many," though the phrase, as implying tradition and 
a kind of communal authorship, is interesting enough; 
one has simply to compare the two with Deloney's own 
ballads, or to compare ballads of purely traditional 
origin with journalistic ballads at large, to see that the 
gulf between can be bridged by no assumption of the 
same origins. 2 

So far as the ballad itself, then, is concerned, we have 
cleared the field of intruders. The minstrel's making is 
dismissed, and v with it the ballad of commerce, the rout 
of lewd and scurrilous songs and of harmless if mawkish 
and sensational journalism. The ballad of our quest is 
a narrative lyric handed down from generation to gen-( 
eration of a homogeneous and unlettered community. 
Such ballads, of course, now and then finding their way 
into the singer's basket and into the stalls, got corrupted 
in the process; yet they show, even in this state, their 
exotic character, as may be seen by the rude, stirring 

1 He calls the other also a "song," just as Sidney spoke of "the 
old song of Percy and Douglas." 

2 Sievers, in his just quoted Thomas Deloney, pp. 130 ff., gives a few 
of the differentiating qualities which sunder into three groups, first, 
these "street-ballads," as he calls them, such as Deloney wrote, secondly, 
the ballads of art, like The Nut-Brown Maid, and, thirdly, genuine 
ballads of the people. Journalism is a better word for the first group. 
Deloney, for example, reports in fairly vivid verse a great fire, the exe- 
cution of Babington and other conspirators, battles at sea, and all the 
rest. It is interesting, further, to see him in true journalistic spirit supply 
a popular demand for sensations by falling back upon the old chronicles. 
Some of his "reports" became universally popular, and were remem- 
bered into the eighteenth century. 



14 THE BALLAD 

verses of "Bewick and Grahame." But we still have 
the adjective, that equivocal word "popular;" and on 
the meaning of "popular" centres the main dispute. 
Of all the definitions offered, and they are innumerable, 
we can make two clearly sundered classes : the definition 
by destination, and the definition by origins. Now it is 
clear that only a definition by origins really defines. When 
Aristotle sets off from actual, artistic, deliberate poetry 
a mass of antecedent verse marked by improvisation, 
song, and choral dance, or when Mr. George Meredith x 
says that ballads grow "like mushrooms from a scuffle 
of feet on grass overnight," one is on the trail, though by 
no means at the finish, of a definition by origins; and 
such a definition can be used for purposes of exclusion 
as well as of inclusion in making up the ballad corpus. 
If, however, one simply defines the popular ballad as a 
narrative lyric which in course of oral tradition has come 
into favor with the people, then there is nothing but the 
law of copyright and the personal fame of Mr. Kipling 
which could serve at some future day to exclude his 
"Danny Deever" from a collection of English popular 
ballads or to differentiate it from "Hobie Noble" and 
"Jock o' the Side." There are three hundred and five 
individual ballads in Professor Child's volumes; and in 
his opinion the collection was complete. Mr. Andrew 
Lang's ingenious plea 2 for "Auld Maitland" does not 

1 The Amazing Marriage, chap, xxxiv. 

2 See Folk Lore, xiii, 191 ff. The ballad is printed in the old edition 
of ballads made by Mr. Child, but he calls it a modern imitation. * 



"POPULAR" TO BE DEFINED BY ORIGINS 15 

really affect the case. He thinks it a popular and tradi- 
tional ballad; Mr. Child thought it spurious. Both agree 
in the tests. So it is with inclusions. There are ballads in 
Child's final volume no better than " Auld Maitland," not 
so good, which the editor would gladly have jettisoned; 
they are inserted, as he tells us, by the advice of Grundt- 
vig, and on the chance that they preserve a few shreds 
of tradition. Buchan's ballads from the north of Scot- 
land are in some cases more than doubtful; but often 
they may be sound; and so they find entrance. Dr. 
Murray scoff s^t the idea that "Thomas Rymer" grew by 
"oral tradition" out of the romance. There will always 
be challenges of the right of entry for this or that ballad. 
The exclusions, on the other hand, are seldom matters 
of dispute. "The Children in the Wood," the Agincourt 
songs, both the Cambridge and the Harleian, and "The 
Nut-Brown Maid " can come into no collection which 
makes the popular and the traditional its test, — pro- 
vided the test be firm. For these three-hundred-odd 
ballads are either the surviving specimens of a genre, a 
literary species, 1 which is called popular because in its 
main qualities it is derived from the "people," or else 
they are the somewhat arbitrary collection of poems 

1 "A distinct and very important species of poetry," says Professor 
Child in his article on Ballads in Johnson's Cyclopaedia ; and he calls 
fifteenth-century ballads "the creation ... of the whole people, great 
and humble, who were still one in all essentials." He rejects, of course, the 
miraculous, mystic side of the Grimms' idea of popular creation; but he 
insists on popular origins. Poor and imitated ballads of later time, he 
says, " belong to a different genus; they are products of a low kind of art." 



16 THE BALLAD 

which had in some way become favorite and even 
traditional, apart from print, with mainly unlettered 
folk. In the first case they can be treated as a closed 
literary account, and, like the medieval romance, the 
ancient epic, as an outcome of conditions which no 
longer exist and cannot be revived. In the second case, 
while conditions of oral transmission may be changed, 
there is nothing to prevent the daily production of 
ballads which may become in time as popular as any 
in our collections. Moreover, it is possible, under the 
second case, that patient sifting of material might cut 
away a quarter, a third, a half, of these ballads and give 
them to poets of note and name. 1 In the interest of 
mere stability, then, one would like to achieve a satis- 
factory definition by origins and so defend the genre, 
fortify its frontiers, and establish a test and privilege of 
citizenship in balladry. Is there such a thing as poetry 
of the people as opposed to poetry of art? If there is 
such poetry of the people, is the ballad to be counted as 
belonging to it, or at least as derived from it ? 

II. COMMUNAL AUTHORSHIP 

Poetry is now regarded as the concern of that per- 
son whom Emerson once called "the young man in 
a library." True, the poet is anything but a pedant, 
and much learning of the laborious sort has rather 

1 This process is frankly undertaken by Mr. Henderson in his recent 
edition of Scott's Minstrelsy; he thinks, moreover, that the "chaff" 
in Professor Child's collection "is out of all proportion to the wheat." 



THE MODERN POET A BOOKMAN 17 

hindered than helped him. The Renaissance did away 
with that distinction of sterile medieval times which 
restricted the title of poet, even as late as Dante, to the 
writer in Latin; but it still fettered him forever to the 
printed page, as he had been fettered in older days to 
the manuscript. Pedes, says the Anglo-Saxon ^Elfric 
in a Latin Grammar which he wrote for his country- 
men in their own tongue, "pedes are 'feet,' with which 
Poetae, that is, the learned sceopas, set their songcraft in 
books." Here is the real point. Here is where we begin 
to spell poetry with capital letters. The poet, to be sure, 
need not be learned, and his art is no longer a depart- 
ment of what the medieval man called grammar; but 
to set one's own songcraft in books, to take heart and 
fire from the songcraft in other books, is the case of the 
most inspired poet and the most original. Dante himself 
and his Vergil confess it; Chaucer, Milton, Gray, have 
vindicated the rights of the scholar in English poetry. 
So that, with a little harmless stretching of the terms, it 
may be said that all which now goes under the name of 
poetry, though not under the name of verse or song, is 
written by one of these young men in a library for an- 
other young man in another library. And there is nothing 
in the case to bewail; no modern Rousseau need beat 
his breast over the reign of books. Herder, the apostle 
of popular verse, who could on occasion wax sarcastic 
about the "paper eternity" of a modern poet as com- 
pared with the effect of a Homer " singing in the street," 
had to concede that the transcendent if solitary benefit 



18 THE BALLAD 

of the art of printing is " the invisible commerce of minds 

and hearts" which springs from it. Sainte-Beuve's 

"ivory tower" is the reader's refuge as well as the poet's 

stronghold; if one cannot now hear Homer "singing 

in the streets," this loss is more than offset by the 

gain of reading him in the study. It is true that persistent 

silence of appeal has robbed poetry of a part of its charm; 

but the printed word still has a suggestive power. As 

Rostand prettily says, — 

. . . "La merveille 
Du beau mot mysterieux, 
C'est qu'on le lit de Poreille, 
Et qu'on l'ecoute des yeux." 

Only romantic folly could turn its back upon the triumphs 
of literature, strictly so called, and assert superiority for 
illiterate verse. Poetry made in the tower, the " library," 
has for compensation the range of all experience. Its 
emotion is wide as humanity; its reflection is cosmic. 
Its maker, even in common phrase, is held to have some- 
thing of the divine and the inexplicable, stands far above 
his fellows, and looks out on the universe. But how came 
he to such height, such prospect? He is standing on the 
great edifice of poetry itself; and when one asks about 
this, and not about the chosen few who inhabit its high 
places, when one considers poetry as a human achieve- 
ment, figures like the library and the tower are inade- 
quate. Poetry is a vast pyramid, widening, but losing in 
aesthetic significance, as one approaches its base. Sands of 
time have drifted about it; the huge courses of its foun- 



THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY 19 

dation are buried forever from view in their full reach and 
plan, and only some happy chance of record or survival 
affords a glimpse of the lower masonry. Here, indeed, 
on the larger level, was no far view of time and space, 
no incitement to solitary but cosmic thinking: yet here. 
in compensation, were ampler room, closer touch with 
facts, and commerce with one's fellows. Opposed to that 
memorial and prophetic dreamer on the peak, there is 
seen, in the primitive stages of poetry, and in certain 
survivals, a throng of people without skill to read or 
write, without ability to project themselves into the 
future, or to compare themselves with the past, or even 
to range their experience with the experience of other 
communities, gathered in festal mood. and. by loud 
song, perfect rhythm, and energetic 'dance, expressing 
their feelings over an event of quite local origin, present 
appeal, and common interest. Here, in point of evolution, 
is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of 
the pyramid; in point of poetic process here is the social 
as opposed to the individual element. This festal throng 
and its rude choral verse are just as much a fact, apart 
from questions of value, as the young man in a library 
and his poem. The two pairs differ, not merely in degree 
of excellence, but in essence, in kind: and this distinction 
has been made from the beginnings of critical effort. 
Aristotle excluded improvised and choral song not only 
from the valued file of verse, but altogether from the 
poetic category; yet in these rude chants he recognized the 
sources of poetry itself. True, he begins actual poetry 



20 THE BALLAD 

only with the poet and the genius. "iEschylus dimin- 
ished the importance of the chorus;" and behind him 
looms up Thespis the founder; there is always some 
figure of this kind about whom we sing the deus illefuit, 
the hero-myth in arts as in practical life. "Let us now 
praise famous men . . . leaders of the people . . . such 
as found out musical tunes and recited verses in writ- 
ing," says Ecclesiasticus. And here, indeed, we seem to 
have inverted the pyramid. Poetry is imitation of the 
masters, we say; but we say no truth in terms of poetic 
development. The masters are really successive focal 
points, results, each of them, of a process of evolution, 
summaries and not beginnings. They take at first their 
tune, their occasion, their sympathy and sentiment, from 
the chorus and the dancing, singing throng, precisely as 
Aristotle points out; on this rhythmic and social ma- 
terial they stamp their individual art. In later stages 
they begin with the literary traditions, the temper of the 
time, public demand, which are subtler elements indeed, 
but quite as communal and conventional in essence as 
the old choral conditions. The pyramid allegory is so far 
misleading that it fails to carry the constant interplay 
of artist and throng in long reaches of poetic develop- 
ment, as if rather there had been a succession of pyra- 
mids; it is true, however, in its general implication that 
the course of poetry has run from a state where social 
conditions were dominant, to a state where individuals 
are so in the foreground of art and the chorus or throng 
so deep in the background, that we talk only of poets, of 



THE CHORAL FOUNDATION 21 

their poems, and no more of the undifferentiated mass, 
the raw material, whence they derive. Yet this raw 
material has always been recognized in a romantic and 
incidental way. Tibullus, in a pretty elegy, makes his 
primitive farmer the first to sing " rustic" words to a 
regular rhythm — certo pede — and first to essay the 
choral dance; while the earliest songs of labor, as he 
thinks, were those that first resounded to the country 
wife's spinning- wheel. 1 Mention and recognition are not 
all. Poetry of the people, as distinguished from the 
poetry of art, has come upon the record, a transfer 
mainly due to the Romantic School. Since Rousseau's 
day, the rich man and the wise man have really circum- 
navigated the globe; and the sciences of anthropology, 
ethnology, sociology, are the result, sciences which have 
made sure the old theoretical and critical antithesis 
of popular and artistic verse. Ethnology, indeed, has 
gathered an immense amount of savage or half-savage 
" literature," in which, under certain limitations, the scholar 
can see a reflection of poetry in its primitive form. The 
other sciences have given other help. It was a professor 
of sociology 2 who demonstrated the vast importance of 
this primitive verse in early stages of man's social career, 
and the great part played by choral rhythm in the mak- 
ing of society itself. The modern science of folklore, 

1 Discussions about the relative priority of epic, lyric, drama, were 
really settled by Miillenhoff, who showed that choral poetry, inclusive 
of all three, is the primitive form; and here the German scholar joined 
hands with Aristotle. 

2 Bticher, Arbeit und Rhythmus. 



22 THE BALLAD 

moreover, has actually revealed amid byways of civilized 
life a host of survivals in song, dance, chorals of the 
festal year, refrains of labor and the march, all point- 
ing to a time when such verse was found everywhere 
in Europe, and sprang from social conditions under 
which the universal gift of improvisation was still 
mainly unchecked. 

No sensible critic now quarrels outright with these 
conclusions of ethnology and folklore. None denies either 
the survivals or the mass of surely indicated but van- 
ished verse made among the people by the peop4e, rather 
than, as is the process of authorship, outside of the 
people for the people. Improvisation of verses in a sing- 
ing, dancing throng is a fact assured for a vast range 
of times and places. The critic contents himself by say- 
ing with Aristotle that these improvisations are not poetry 
and do not even result in the popular ballad; the gap, 
he says, between popular verse and popular ballads has 
not been bridged. It will be well, therefore, not to take 
the matter for granted. We must look at two or three 
positive statements by way of proof that homogeneous, 
unlettered communities have existed at times and places 
which are not remote ; and we must find out what 
sort of verse resulted under these conditions. Radloff, 
who studied, at the closest possible range, the life of 
certain tribes in southern Siberia, found that if isolation 
from other influences be granted, the homogeneous folk 
is a fact. " An almost inconceivable uniformity," he says, 
marks the tribe. In five volumes of patient record and 



ETHNOLOGICAL EVIDENCE 23 

unerring critical skill, the author presents, not a theory 
of popular poetry, but the body of it in actual presence, 
and a careful account of the conditions under which it 
is produced. More than this, he shows that wherever 
contact with literature was felt in any force, there the folk 
song and the ballad, along with that knack of improvi- 
sation which produced them, declined, and were in a fair 
way to disappear before the poetry of the learned poet. 
No sociological parallels are absolute; but this popular 
"literature" observed amid the steppes of southern 
Siberia can at least establish a probability for the same 
kind of literature under similar conditions in medieval 
Europe. But Radloff's account is not an isolated case. 
The same tale is told over and over again; it is merely 
a matter of chance in the extent to which old ruins jhave 
been spared and modern survivals have been accessible. 
Isolation is a prime preservative in popular verse. How 
far George Borrow 1 really knew his Basques and their 
songs may be a question; but his account is borne out 
by more exact inquiry. They have, he says, no poet or 
poetry ; but all of them sing, and they sing " songs, bal- 
lads, and stanzas," — the latter, no doubt, improvisations 
of the common European type. The music is martial 
and fine; " but such words! Nothing can be imagined 
more stupid, commonplace and uninteresting," — that is, 
uninteresting to George Borrow. Here and there, how- 

1 Bible in Spain, ii, 393 f. See also F. Michel, Le Pays Basque, 
Paris, 1857, pp. 214 f., and Blade, Dissertation sur les Chants Heroiques 
des Basques, Paris, 1866, pp. 6 ff. 



24 THE BALLAD 

ever, something of demonstrable interest, if not of poetic 
value, springs from popular improvisation; and for this 
reason our third case is perhaps the most instructive of 
all. On the remote Faroe Islands, where the community 
even now is homogeneous to a remarkable degree, 1 
where the old dances, with joined hands, in a great circle, 
are still danced to the tune of a traditional ballad which 
all must sing, and where on occasion every member of a 
festive throng must still improvise his stanza, conditions 
of a century ago favored communal verse in a measure 
seldom found with folk of such an advanced stage of 
civilization. The ballad was and is sung by this people 
"not, like dance-music, simply to order their steps," 
but "by its meaning and contents, to waken certain 
feelings. The dancers by their gestures and expressions 
. . . take pains ... to show the various contents." 
They sang, to be sure, many old songs about Sigurd, 
the hero of Icelandic literary traditions. This, however, 
was not all. They could also make a new ballad, in most 
dramatic fashion, at the dance; as, for example, when 
some fisherman has had a mishap with his boat, sturdy 
companions push him out into the dancing throng, and 
first one and then another stanza is improvised upon the 
fatal theme, until a complete story of the situation, with 
much repetition, we may be sure, uproarious refrain, 
and considerable dramatic action, is attained. If the 

1 The modern instances are taken from N. Annandale, The Faroes 
and Iceland, Oxford, 1905, pp. 42, 62 fT.; the older account is from 
Lyngye's Fcerfliske Quceder, etc., Randers, 1822, pp. viii, 14. 



POETRY OF THE PEOPLE 25 

song wins general favor, so the good missionary says, 
it is remembered and sung from year to year, — a gen- 
uine traditional and communal ballad. 

There can be no question, then, of the facts. Popular 
improvisation at the dance has been the source of cer- 
tain traditional lyric narratives; and ethnology could 
pile up similar evidence from her stores of observation 
among less civilized races all over the world. But there 
is no need to draw further upon these records. Every- 
body musjfc admit the existence of this poetry of the peo- 
ple made under conditions radically different from those 
which determine the making of artistic poetry. Conces- 
sion to the popular muse goes even farther; and one 
admits that only a while ago she was knocking at our 
doors. Europe, until a very recent date, still rang in all 
rural places to the echo of refrain and chorus made by 
labor in house or field, by festal mirth at the dance, at 
wedding and harvest-home, and by communal sorrow at 
the funeral. Soldiers even now sing their iterating and 
cumulative chorus on the march. Although a careless 
challenge is now and then offered to the idea that "pop- 
ular" can be in these cases an adjective by origins, 
critics are fairly content to hand over all this choral, 
iterative, and nugatory verse to the antiquarian or to the 
folklore enthusiast and bid him label the stuff as he sees 
fit, provided he do not call it poetry. It is masterless 
in every sense, "orphan" making, as the Elizabethans 
would say; no Burns, no Villon and Dunbar, a pair 
whom recent suspicion accuses of making many of the 



26 THE BALLAD 

actual ballads, will claim it. But the "people" sing 
other verses. The Norwegian peasant does not only 
improvise his stev ; the Italian girls, as they gather 
olives, can sing something else than the stornelli which 
fly back and forth from tree to tree; the Bavarian youth 
and maiden, facing each other at the dance, have or had 
other songs than their isolated stanzas of praise or blame 
exchanged on the spur of the occasion; the Faroe folk 
not merely improvised verses about luckless fishermen, 
but chanted old lays of Sigurd; and the cottager of 
England or Scotland, besides rough chorus of harvest- 
home, knows or did know certain anonymous verses, of 
the same kind and spirit, to be sure, but with such use of 
literary or romantic stuff, such an aesthetic appeal, and 
such a satisfactory coherence of parts, as to make the 
critic prick his ears. "What are these?" he asks. "Bal- 
lads," he is answered; "the popular ballad of Europe, 
traditional for five centuries." But the critic at once 
asserts a difference in the two kinds of popular verse. 
He concedes to the throng its odds and ends of rime, 
its rude refrain, its iterated and unmeaning choral; he 
claims these ballads as poems, and begins a search for 
their poets. They own, he thinks, a shaping hand. They 
differ absolutely from any mere collocation of verses 
made in alternate suggestion to the rhythm of refrain 
and dance. They have a narrative often traced to literary- 
sources, and are informed by that epic purpose impos- 
sible as outcome of mere festal improvisation. Trained 
to test his material by classical standards, the critic is 



THE CRITIC AND THE BALLAD 27 

sure that ballads are popular only by destination and not 
by origin. If they lie in the world's literary waste-basket 
along with really popular trash, it is simply because they 
have lost their original signatures. 

It must be conceded that the critic makes out a good 
case, so long as one listens only to his side of it; and the 
other side se^ms very remote. Students of popular poetry 
pile up proof of communal makings, of Siberian fly tings 
in verse, of Faroe improvisations; for our immediate 
problem, however, these arguments seem like "Bohe- 
mian villages," and the critic not only puffs finely into 
space the notion that folk anywhere out of wonderland 
— or Siberia — can make anything like a coherent poem 
by festal collaboration, but proceeds to trace such an 
actual ballad as "Tarn Lane" in great part to Burns, 
and to assign the whole of "Kinmont Willie" to Scott. 
With consummate ease he tracks 1 a lyric of Schiller 
through all sorts of popular corruptions, or a mawkish bit 
of sentimental verse into a dozen varying versions all 
claimed by the "people;" and he thinks he has solved 
the problem of traditional ballads, and cheerfully as- 
sumes that this study of poetic distortion by the lower 
classes represents the facts of oral tradition in homoge- 
neous communities now unknown. He laughs at Siberia 
and the Faroe Isles. But candid readers must bear with 
Siberia and the Faroe Isles, must put aside the tempta- 
tions of Burns and Scott, and must admit that the ballad 
has two handles. There is the "popular" handle, joined 
1 See John Meier, Kunstlied im Volksmunde, 1906, pp. xiv, ff. 



28 THE BALLAD 

in the piece with elements for which modern poetic 
methods cannot account; and there is the " aesthetic" 
handle, joined also in the piece with characteristics due 
to something better than rustic improvisations. Lusty 
pulling in these contrary directions has been going on 
for decades, like a tug of war; the question itself gets 
little advance by such treatment, and it is time to ap- 
proach the ballad in some more rational way. 

III. COMMUNAL POETRY OTHER THAN BALLADS 

Briefly stated, and without regard to any theory, 
the question of popular ballads amounts to this: at 
their best, they were sung and transmitted from gen- 
eration to generation by people who were mainly of the 
absolutely unlettered class, who neither read anything 
nor wrote anything, and who were demonstrably, as 
well, the makers and transmitters of those chorals and 
refrains and improvisations which everybody concedes 
to popular origin. On the other hand, a good popular 
ballad differs from these refrains and improvised stanzas 
in that it has coherence in structure, definite contents, 
and what is surely an aesthetic if not a literary appeal. 
Either, then, the ballad, which carries such popular 
elements as the refrain or chorus and those peculiari- 
ties of structure which we shall presently examine in 
detail, is originally a product of the people under condi- 
tions of improvisation and choral dance, but ennobled 
and enriched on its traditional course in such a way as to 
endow it with something of the dignity of art; or else 



THE REAL BALLAD QUESTION 29 

it is originally a poem, made like any other poem, but 
submitted by tradition to influences which give it a 
"popular" character. It is either the choice and glory 
of wild flowers or a degenerate of the garden. Each of 
these explanations of the ballad is reasonable in itself, 
and does not conflict with common sense. One of them 
must be right, the other wrong. If the former is right, the 
present book can deal with a definite subject and be 
based upon compact and complete material, — the col- 
lection of Professor Child. If the second explanation 
is right, all boundaries of the subject are obscured, the 
material is questionable, and a haze at once fills the 
air, that haze to which we are accustomed in "Thoughts 
on Poetry" and kindred works of great amiability and 
scope. Decision of this question, therefore, is not merely 
a pedantic or academic affair; it is vital, inevitable. For 
reaching a decision, two plain lines of inquiry are indi- 
cated. It is in order to study the ballad itself, to get an 
accurate idea of its elements in all their bearings, and 
to determine whether these are to be referred, as older 
critics would put it, to nature or to art, to the people or 
to the poet. It is also in order to study the actual ballads, 
muster them in every way, and find out what they reveal 
in regard to their sources. 

If, indeed, this revelation of sources were complete, 
if the ballads of Europe could be followed as individ- 
ual poems back through all their changes to their original 
form, the ballad question would be solved at once; but 
the bridge is broken, and connection must be made in 



30 THE BALLAD 

some other way. To begin with, the medium of trans- 
mission is an uncertain one at best, — oral tradition, 
seldom reduced to written record. Again, ballads as a 
body, and in the shape in which they now lie before us, 
go back through the fifteenth century; and there they 
cease. Older and lost versions, to be sure, are easily 
traced through the thirteenth century. The Robin Hood 
cycle must have been forming then; and another cycle, 
bracketed with the greenwood ballads by the author of 
"Piers Plowman," celebrated the deeds of one of the 
last great feudal lords, Randolph, Earl of Chester, but 
has been totally lost. Analogy tempts us to conceive the 
songs about Hereward to have been ballads of the same 
type; so that it is usual to speak of English ballads as 
running back to the Conquest, as well as to believe that 
the ancestors of men who sung their Hereward and their 
Randolph must have had, before the Conquest, in spite 
of changed conditions in speech and verse, something 
not unlike the ballad beloved of the sons. But all this 
is in the realm of conjecture, however plausible and 
right conjecture may seem to be. As actual material, 
ballads are not to be found in any number in England 
before the fifteenth century. Thence come the best 
Robin Hood versions. The Percy folio manuscript, 
written in the seventeenth century, and oral tradition in 
Scotland for the past hundred and fifty years, will ac- 
count for nearly all the rest of the collection. These are 
the actual ballads; and with one insignificant exception, 
nothing of the same kind, nothing resembling them in 



CONDITIONS OP SURVIVAL SI 

structure, metrical form, and style, can be found in 
earlier records. 1 The doors of a pedieval library were 
shut inexorably upon the popular muse; poetry was a 
part of "grammar;" traditional song lived and died with 
the humble generations whom it consoled. 

It is clear, then, why ballads cannot be found upon 
the literary record before this time; but, since they belong 
in any case rather to oral tradition than to script or 
print, one asks why a tenacious popular memory, re- 
gardless of records, does not stretch beyond that baffling 
period of literary readjustments well into the traditions 
of medieval Europe. Again, there is a plain and con- 
vincing reply. Poetry made in the vernacular, and orally 
transmitted, depends for its preservation upon such lin- 
guistic stability as will enable it to pass from generation 
to generation without the changes of word and form 
that make it both unintelligible as language and impos- 
sible as verse. Such linguistic stability begins about the 
time when we date our oldest English ballads; both 
Barbour and the author of "Piers Plowman" mention 
them in the fourteenth century, and the versions which 
have come down to us are only a little later in origin. 
Moreover, though this subject is extremely difficult, 
the naming of "Piers Plowman" reminds us that with 
the early fifteenth century, and in the face of a most 

1 As paper came to be used for manuscripts, popular verses stood a 
better chance of record. Such random stuff as sailors' cries and other 
popular rimes is found in the Trinity Coll. MS. R. 3, 19, which is paper, 
and dates from Henry \Ts reign. See Wright and Halliwell's Reliquiae 
Antiquae, i, 2 ff. 



32 THE BALLAD 

remarkable popular revival of the old Germanic rhythm, 
English prosody was nevertheless settling into the system 
which has obtained in all our modern verse. It is hard, 
so far as metres are concerned, to make an equation 
between Chaucer's fling at rom-ram-ruf and the "Piers 
Plowman" fling at "rimes of Robin Hood;" but the 
"rimes of Robin Hood" were there, they were in the new 
metres, and they prevailed. 

The bridge is broken, then, between our popular 
ballads and their supposed medieval representatives; but 
can we not mend the bridge, or rather, can we not recog- 
nize the lost planks and piers as they have been used 
again in another and still existing structure ? One is con- 
stantly hearing of ballads as the basis of many a medieval 
record, as the source of many a medieval poem. Obliging 
hands have even " restored " these ballads by a few simple 
dissections, excisions, insertions, combinations, infer- 
ences, conjectures, and appeals to the open mind. From 
this restored material to the collections of modern days 
is an easy leap, — provided one takes the restored ma- 
terial on trust. But this is precisely what one must not 
do. There is no objection, to be sure, in calling touch of 
this older and mainly inferred poetry by the general 
name of ballad ; but in very few cases is it clear what the 
ballad really was in terms of its structure and its origin. 
Traditional ballads are obviously and absolutely differ- 
ent from those songs made by the professional ^minstrel, 
mainly for a political end, some of which have survived 
from the twelfth century in England; these were ephe- 



TOPICAL AND CHRONICLE "BALLADS" 33 

meral. popular in the sense of the Limburger Chronicle 
when it records sundry songs as "sung this year" by 
the German people and hurried into oblivion along with 
the excitement or passing interest which they served. 
What was ">gung this year*' is exactly opposite to what 
the folk have sung steadily through a long series of years. 
Political songs, rimes of the moment upon whatever 
topic attracts popular attention, cannot pass as traditional 
ballads. Moreover, the uniformity of the Middle Ages 
must not be pushed too far; there was a diversity of 
talent as well as a variety of product; and when a song 
or a ballad, otherwise unknown, is mentioned, its nature 
is not lightly to be assumed. 

Still less confidence is in order for cases where one 
suspects a "ballad" to be lurking behind some metrical 
portion of the old chronicles or some particularly vivid 
piece of narrative, or some event embedded in the pop- 
ular epic. It is well known that the brief notices of the 
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are broken for the year 755 by a 
most dramatic and detailed story, recognized by Ten Brink 
as a later interpolation and claimed as the summary in 
prose of "an English lay." It is good ballad stuff, no 
doubt: but no ballad style or structure, no hint of rhythm 
or repetition or refrain, is left: and one is rather reminded 
of the swift, relentless narrative pace, if not of the ar- 
tistic perfection, in an Icelandic saga. The actual poetry 
of the Chronicle, moreover, as we shall presently see, 
though it has been sundered into "learned" and "popu- 
lar" classes, has absolutely nothing in it which can be 



34 THE BALLAD 

compared with traditional ballads, — the "popular" 
poem on the death of Edgar for an example. One hears 
of Alfred's love for "Saxon" poetry, and of Dunstan's 
preference — an enemy charged him with it — for 
avitae gentilitatis vanissima earmina et historiarum fri- 
volas . . . incantationum naenias: but what were they? 
"Heathen popular songs," saith mine author; but the 
answer is not definite for ballad purposes. Absolutely 
no Anglo-Saxon verse which has come down shows a 
shred of structural and formal identity with the actual 
ballads; there is no strophic division, no refrain, save 
in the song of Deor, — and that pretty lyric denies bal- 
ladry in every syllable. Something like the ballad, it has 
been said above, our ancestors must have had; but 
nothing can be restored and little can be guessed. Cer- 
tainly neither " Maldon Fight" nor a poem from the 
Chronicle like "Brunanburh" can pass as a traditional 
ballad. Immediate as an echo, self-conscious, the latter 
is a summary and challenge of English patriotism, sung 
from a watch-tower. They are both made on the epic 
pattern dominant everywhere in Anglo-Saxon verse; and, 
indeed, the uniform style and the slight differences in 
metrical form which all that poetry reveals make one of 
the marvels of literature. Such a lyrical subject as "The 
Wife's Complaint," for instance, should lend itself ad- 
mirably to the ballad style, and ought to differ structur- 
ally from epic; but how traditionally epic are its phrases, 
how sophisticated its variations and metaphors, how 
intricate and interlaced its stichic verses, and how remote 



NO ANGLO-SAXON BALLADS 35 

it is from actual singing, compared with the simplicity of 
style, the choral suggestion of structure, the repetitions, 
and the irresistible lilt, in a real traditional ballad of later 
time but similar theme ! In the first case a banished wife 
says that while many happy lovers throughout the world 
are still locked in embraces, she must go at daybreak — 

" Under the oak to the earth-eaves lone, 
'There must I sit the summer-long day, 
there must I weep my weary exile, 
my need and misery. Nevermore 
shall I cease from the sorrow my soul endureth, 
from all the longing this life has brought me!'" 

She gives a romantic touch to her landscape, which is 
as dreary as that of Mariana in the moated grange : — 

'"Dim are the dales, the dunes are high, 
bitter my burgwalls, 1 briar-covered, 
joyless my dwelling.' " 

Contrast with this the ballad, 2 later of record by nearly 
a thousand years, where a mother has been " carried off, 
four days after bearing a son, to serve as nurse in the 
elf-queen's family." 

" ' I heard a cow low, a bonnie cow low, 
An' a cow low down in yon glen; 
Lang, lang will my young son greet 
Or his milker bid him come ben. 

" * I heard a cow low, a bonnie cow low, 
An' a cow low down in yon fauld; 
Lang, lang will my young son greet 
Or his mither take him jrae cauld.' " 

1 "Citadel-hedges," what should be her " castle walls." 

2 Child, no. 40, The Queen of Elfarts Nourice. 



36 THE BALLAD 

Let the lyrics go, we are told; surely there are ballads 
in the national epic itself, and surely they stretch through 
our old colonial or heathen literature back in majestic 
line to the chants about Arminius and the rout of Roman 
legions in the forest of the fatherland. True, we have 
no continuity of heroes, as with Scandinavian Sigurds 
and Brynhilds, 1 from late ballads back to early epic; but 
the break is easy to explain. What cannot be explained 
is the exact nature of those "ballads" which doubtless 
served as basis for the epic in both Scandinavian and 
English, of those cantilenae, songs called by whatever 
name, which once carried the tale of legendary Beowulf, 
developed the myth of Sigurd, and spread far and wide 
the deeds of historical Charlemagne. How is one to make 
a precise statement about them and connect them, for 
purposes of poetic classification, with that actual mass 
of ballads, wonderfully uniform in structure and style, 
which make up the later Germanic group, — English, 
Scottish, Scandinavian, German? Something, surely, 
can be confidently said about the older songs. "It is 
probable," says Gaston Paris, 2 "that the verses were 
grouped in stanzas, and were alliterative with the Ger- 
mans, assonant for the Romance." They had the refrain, 
and were so far choral. They fall into two chronological 

1 Professor Ker calls The JV inning of Thor's Hammer a ballad 
as it stands. Epic and Romance, p. 130. See, however, his distinc- 
tion between epic and ballad, as a difference in kind due to style, 
pp. 147 ff. 

2 His results still hold with little change from later criticism. See 
Romania, xiii, 603* 617; Histoire Poetique de Chad., pp. 11, 21, 48, 69. 



SURVIVALS OF IMPROVISATION IN EPIC 37 

classes: first comes the rude cantilena, flourishing from 
the seventh to the tenth century, "improvised, and con- 
temporary with the facts," made by warriors and sung 
by warrior^ about their own deeds. Anglo-Saxon and 
earlier Germanic fighting men, thinks Gaston Paris, had 
at first no class of minstrels to sing for them; every 
man could improvise and sing his own verses. The 
second period is that of the professional poet, the jongleur, 
minstrel, court bard, who worked up the old material 
into coherent and protracted lays. On this foundation 
rested the later epic; and it is not hard even in the third 
stage to recover many a hint of the first. Survivals of 
the old warrior improvisations are to be found, with little 
change due to an epic setting, in Roland's famous speech, 
with the refrain remnant at its close, inciting his com- 
rades to play the man, show no fear, give no occasion 
for reproachful and scandalous songs on their cowardice, 
and above all to bide faithful to their lord the king; in 
the cry of the Saxon warrior at Maldon, true to his dead 
chieftain, as to the old Germanic strain; in the appeal of 
repentant Wiglaf in the Beowulf. Doubtless all these 
might be traced back to the improvised boast-song of 
the Germanic clansman in hall or camp, at the feast 
before the fight, with a refrain of his comrades, truci 
cantu, as Tacitus calls it. a wild choral ringing through 
woods and hills to the amazement of the silent Roman 
legions. A distant and confused echo of this warrior im- 
provisation may even linger in balladry, as when Johnny 
Armstrong calls to his men, — 



38 THE BALLAD 

"Saying, * Fight on, my merry men all, 
I am a little hurt, but I am not slain; 
I will lay me down for to bleed a while, 

Then I '11 rise and fight with you again,' " — 

or when the Percy and the Douglas pledge their word 
for a battle to the death. This is legitimate conjecture; 
but it is no proof of identity as to old song and later bal- 
lad. Occasion, subject, spirit, may be alike; but what 
of structure, style, and poetical form? Tradition, again, is 
a prime factor in ballads; it chooses and moulds its ma- 
terial in its own way. The battle is over, the captains and 
the kings depart, and the very shouting of the warriors' 
chorus dies away; reminiscent, not too sure of details 
even while it adds them, tradition sings the fight cen- 
turies later in no dramatic and immediate style. "Old 
men," says the "Cheviot" ballad, — 

" Old men that knowen the grownde well yenoughe, 
Call it the battell of Otterburn," — 

and it is probable that both the famous ballads, different 
as they are, describe one and the same event. Professor 
Child thinks that Sheale's copy of 1559, or thereabouts, 
is much more modern than "the rude and ancient form" 
of the "Cheviot" which Sidney heard, a decade or so later, 
sung by the "blind crowder" of his famous avowal. If 
this is the work of tradition between the actual making 
of a ballad like the " Cheviot," as it must have been sung 
immediately after the fight, and its estate at the time of 
Sheale's record, or between the "Cheviot" and "Otter- 
burn," what is one to say of analogies between our popu- 



THE BEOWULF NOT POPULAR 39 

lar, traditional ballads and the old sources of the chanson 
de geste ? How much was left of warriors' improvisations 
and choral \n the " ballad" that served as stock-in-trade 
for the gleemen of Germanic days; and how much w T as 
left of this ballad when the poet of the epic had wrought 
it over in a process not far removed from modern poetic 
composition? For the Beowulf is surely the deliber- 
ate work of a poet; its art is far higher than the art of 
that epic in embryo made five or six centuries later by 
some humble rhapsode from the ballads of Robin Hood. 
Anglo-Saxon poetry, Anglo-Saxon speech, were of a 
more elaborate type than the Norman ; * and the rude 
lay of warriors was already prehistoric, or almost so, 
for the best period of our early colonial literature. Dif- 
ference in structure and rhythm, a strange tongue, and 
the intervening waste of years have all combined to make 
Anglo-Saxon poetry seem the rude product of a rude 
folk. A vivacious English scholar not long ago described 
his ancestors as " stuffing their bellies w T ith acorns," 
and singing lays that accorded with the diet. Gurth 
does not count, though he was surely as intelligent as any 
Norman hireling; but one suspects that Cedric's fore- 
bears were superior in literary taste to the Front-de 
Boeufs and even the Bracys of an earlier day. Anglo- 
Saxon poetry asked a fairly intelligent listener, and it 
was the work, even in what we call popular epic, of an 
artist, a poet. Long before the Beowulf of our version, 
there must have existed on the Continent, among groups 
1 Greenough and Kittredge, Words and their Ways, p. 84. 



40 THE BALLAD 

of kindred tribes whose speech would show some diver- 
gence, a common poetic dialect, the language of wander- 
ing minstrels and of all that intertribal journalism which 
can be inferred from a Widsith. In this poetic dialect, 
perhaps most developed after England had become the 
intellectual clearing-house of Greater Germania, mate- 
rial of all sorts could have been fused, and themes and 
styles could have been exchanged, somewhat as in the 
latyn corupt or corumpus l of the thirteenth century 
minstrels and traveling folk must have passed the lit- 
erary time of day. 

The point is that from cantilenae to epics like the 
Beowulf, from warrior improvisation to court composi- 
tion, the process is open, central, and, to a large extent, 
official. It was on the highway of what then counted 
as literature. It excluded that long tradition which loves 
the bypaths and has nothing to do with court, army, the 
stir of national life. Precisely here the analogy breaks 
down which would range the ballad of oral, communal, 
unsophisticated tradition with such warrior lays as 
formed the basis of the Beowulf. Fortunately a passage 
in our old epic tells us 2 precisely how such songs of the 
fighting man and the aristocratic gleeman were made. 
Jocund riders, coming back from the scene of a notable 
fight, produce a lay which is indeed improvised, but which 

1 See Fulk Fitz Warine, Warton Club, 1855, pp. 127, 168, and 
Wright's note. 

2 See w. 865 ff. It is to be hoped that the word gilphlceden is not 
strained in the interpretation. 



WARRIOR IMPROVISATION NOT BALLADRY 41 

draws upon Germanic legendary verse for a setting and 
for an edifying contrast of character. A king's thane, a 
warrior, wh\> "has taken part in many a poetic contest," 
and is " skillful in improvisation," who furthermore is 
"mindful of songs," has a stock of phrases at command, 
and "holds in memory a mass of old sagas," of tradi- 
tion, "finds fresh words " and makes a new story " based 
on the new facts." And thus "the warrior cleverly 
repeated the adventure of Beowulf, and successfully 
told the story, linking word with word." So the process 
is described, and as no strange one. It must have been 
a general habit and a common source of heroic song; 
events passed by improvisation immediately into verse, 
but by the aid of skilled and fairly noble singers. In 
the passage just quoted, other song follows the lay of 
Beowulf and Grendel; conforming to that love of types 
so prominent in Germanic verse, and to a Platonic, not 
Aristotelian, idea of morals in poetry, the singer in 
eulogy of his Jiero goes on to compare Sigemund for 
virtue, and to contrast Heremod for vice, — figures fa- 
mous in Germanic tradition which do not concern us 
here. The introduction of them shows the epic poet's 
reflective tendency; he must allude and suggest rather 
than narrate ; his historical, ethical, and comparative in- 
stincts are utterly alien to any popular ballad. What we 
learn from him is the formula of improvisation and tra- 
dition, by fighting-men of rank or by actual court-poets, 
in the making of such songs as served for source of 
his epic. These two classes are on the same plane in the 



42 THE BALLAD 

Beowulf perspective. 1 Improvisation and tradition, to 
be sure, is also the ballad formula; but a gulf is fixed 
between song and ballad even wider than the distance 
between a remote village fisherman and an international 
hero. This gulf, moreover, is quite as formidable with 
regard to style and structure. We shall presently see that 
the main structural feature of popular ballads is simple 
repetition with incremental changes, utterly void of 
metaphor, which advance the statement of fact, and help 
the narrative, however slowly, on its way. The main 
characteristic of "literary" Germanic, and particularly 
of Anglo-Saxon, poetic structure is crossed and broken 
repetition with variation, which emphasizes only the 
previous fact by the use of kennings, or striking meta- 
phor, but does not advance the story. Springing from 
the same primitive source of exact verbal repetition in 
chorus, the art of the epic and the art of the ballad have 
taken widely sundered courses, and the divergence was 
marked enough at the dawn of Germanic history. For 
Anglo-Saxon times the actual writing of epics had in- 
fluenced narrative art; epic repetition, or summary, 
condenses, whereas ballad repetition, oral in its record, 
repeats literally and at length. To sum the case, Anglo- 
Saxon epic, in its didactic vein, its reflective tendency, its 
comment on the action, its consciously pathetic tone, its 
attitude towards nature, its control of material and cor- 

1 That our court-poets, like jongleurs in France, revised and com- 
bined songs made by the warriors themselves (see G. Paris, Hist. Poet. 
de Chart., p. 121), is probable enough. It is mainly professional songs 
that get on record. 



EPIC AND BALLAD 43 

relation of parts, its organic conception, its descriptive 
power, as well as in its reliance on the lays of song- 
loving warriors and courtly bards, was so far from primi- 
tive methods of the old choral throng, so alien to the 
ways of tradition, that even a Beowmlf can do nothing 
for those who would trace English popular ballads to 
their source. 1 Woden and his runes had long reigned 
over the world even of earliest Beowulf material; to 
find the forerunner of the traditional ballad, one would 
have to track old Norse Thor to his hiding-place, a 
banished god, and w^ould have to discover a forgotten 
mass of choral and homely verse. Can this be done? 
Can we connect our individual ballads as they lie before 
us with the old communal song of medieval Europe ? 

This, too, is an impossible achievement. Of course, 
those old songs and refrains of the people did not die 
with the occasion which called them forth. They not 
only lived in tradition, but sprang up with ever} 7 need of 
the daily round of life. Unwritten, just as ordinary ex- 
perience is unwritten, they filled with song and dance 
the whole festal year. The ritual of a hundred super- 
stitions, ignored by the great, added to this store of rude 

1 The repetitions of a message, or the like, are more artistic in the 
Beowulf, more varied, than one would expect. In the fifteenth book 
of the Iliad, on the other hand, Iris delivers to Poseidon almost liter- 
ally the message of Zeus. So in the ballads ; for example, in Child 
Maurice. Contrast Wulf gar's cleverly paraphrased report of Beowulf's 
message to Hrothgar, w. 340 ff. This constant artistic effort after pic- 
turesque variation is quite above the ballad reach, and demands, like 
the kindred "thought-rime" in Hebrew poetry, intellectual effort on 
the part of the hearer. 



44 THE BALLAD 

and choral verse. In a sense now totally unfamiliar, 
song resounded through the whole communal life; and 
all life, apart from court and camp, was of this simple, 
homogeneous, communal kind. The choral and com- 
munal song of the Middle Ages was undoubtedly the 
ultimate source of our ballad as a poetic species; and 
yet it is impossible to seize upon any one phase of that 
old poetry and connect actual ballad with actual choral 
verse. There were many kinds of choral verse, as one 
can tell in general from medieval allusions as well as 
in particular from the variety of old English compounds 
with the words leoft, lay, and lac, game, dance, ritual. 
On every side we hear tantalizing echoes of these chorals 
from men and women, from high and low estate, from 
camp, from the conventional garden where aristocratic 
folk amuse themselves, from the " ladies foure and twenty, 
and yet mo," whom the wife of Bath's knight saw danc- 
ing by the forest, or other four and twenty ladies playing 
ball with song and graceful steps, from the village, from 
the church itself, from old pagan holy places new sancti- 
fied by episcopal benediction. But no one can or will 
tell us what they sing; at best, as we shall see, the infor- 
mation is misleading or vague. 

There were chorals of war. Germanic warriors rushed 
into fight singing refrains to their gods of battle; and 
doubtless their sons on English soil did the same thing. 
The repeated cries seem to have carried sense and to 
have excited the singers by something more than mere 
noise. Ammianus Marcellinus says that the Goths, 



GAP BETWEEN CHORAL AND BALLAD 45 

hurrying hito battle, " with discordant noise sang {stride- 
bant) the praises of their ancestors;" and when Taillefer 
chanted his solo at Hastings, there was no doubt a good 
chorus to back him, as well as a right Saxon refrain to 
greet him with defiance, however hoarse Saxon throats 
must have been after the treper, e saillir e chanter, as 
Wace recounts it, of the night before. Hymns, too, were 
choral, with a dramatic dance. Songs and dances of the 
May go back to immemorial ritual and ceremonies in 
worship of Nature and the revival of her powers at the 
springtime; a Russian scholar, who has studied the 
ritualistic songs of his race, comes to a theory of poetic 
origins embraced in the formula of "ceremony ta song, 
song to poetry." * It has been maintained, furthermore, 
that the primitive German hymn was like that song of 
the Arval Brothers in Rome, — cries to the god in repe- 
tition and refrain sung by a dancing throng. Chorals of 
labor, too, rise everywhere in medieval life, and still 
exist in survival. In fact, nearly all emotional expression 
was once public and concerted in its utterance, and loved 
the rhythmic fall of feet as well as of voice; but the 
obviousness and range of this rude song forbade its 
preservation except in the traditional way. Of bridal 
and funeral songs, originally bound up with the dance, 
there is evidence of every sort; but actual record occurs 

1 Anichkof, as reported by Dr. Arthur Beatty in his valuable study 
of the St. George Plays, in Trans. Wisconsin Acad. Sciences, Arts and 
Letters, xv, 11, October, 1906. See also J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the 
Early History of Kingship, 1905, pp. 164, 178; and E. K. Chambers, 
The Mediaeval Stage, vol. i. 



46 THE BALLAD 

only in cases where the accomplished warrior-poet or 
the professional minstrel was concerned. Young men, 
the flower of their clan, rode round the tomb of Beowulf, 
chanting his praises; and the strikingly dignified con- 
clusion of our epic echoes their very words. Of a similar 
song chanted by warriors of Attila, but quite in the 
Gothic manner, we have a Latin paraphrase. But this 
is no choral and communal song; again, we have to 
think of a Widsith or a Deor, or rather, in these cases, 
of song-skilled warriors like him of Hrothgar's court, 
who chanted the fight with Grendel. Contrast the ac- 
count given by Jordanis * of another royal death and 
funeral song, where soldiers bore their slain chieftain 
from the fight. "Then one could see the Gothic squad- 
rons, even amid the rage and rush of battle, showing 
the last honors to their king, and singing with inhar- 
monious 2 voices their songs of grief." With which, now, 
of these funeral songs, the sonorous, stately praise or the 
wild choral wailings, are we to connect later ballads of 
grief like "Bonnie James Campbell" and the rest? The 
answer is prompt enough. So far as the evidence goes, 
with neither of them. In the one case, style, structure, 
manner, differ absolutely from the style and structure of 
the ballad. In the other case, we have no record. 

The festal year, too, was full of choral song; and here 
one assumes, with great show of truth, the origins of 

1 The two accounts are respectively in chaps, xli and xlix. 

2 Doubtless Jordanis means by this word what Julian meant in his 
contemptuous account of Germanic songs; it is the rude but rhythmic 
choral of a throng. 



CHORAL AND LYRIC 47 

v 

the older ballad. But in what one recorded case ? High- 
born folk loved the carole, and sang as they danced: 
many a picture in the old manuscripts shows them at 
their play, and Gawin Douglas l gives us a hint of what 
they were wont to sing : — 

" Sum [sang] ryng-sangis. dansys ledis. and roundis, 
With vocis schill. qnhill all the dail resoundis: 
Quharso thai walk into thar earolyng, 
For arnorus lays doith the Roehys ryng: 
Ane sang, ' the sehyp salys our the salt faym. 
Will bryng thir merchandis and my lemman haym;' 
Sum other syngis. ' I wil be Myth and lycht, 
Mine hart is lent upon sa gudly wight.' '' 

These are not narrative ballads: one thinks rather of 
an origin for love-lyric, and of that scene in Chaucer's 
"Parlement of Foules " where a roundel, or triolet, is 
sung to Nature in a "note" which Chaucer describes as 
''made in France." The ballade, not our ballad, had its 
source in these amorous chorals: although both own the 
common choral feature of repetition and refrain. Actual 
ballads were sung by the "people" themselves, at dance 
and play: witness the famous passage in the "Complaynt 
of Scotland." contemporary with recorded traditional 
ballads which it names. For older times there is plenty 
of general information, but no particular fact to which 
one can link a ballad of the collections. Ballads which 
dealt with prominent persons or events were beyond all 

1 Prologue of book xii of the JEneid. 193 ff. To lead the dance 
was to lead the singing, as the joresinger of German dances testifies; but 
this was a later stage of the original choral. 



48 THE BALLAD 

question made in the choral throng; there is no more 
venerable fact of poetic production. "And Miriam the 
prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her 
hand; and all the women went out after her with tim- 
brels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, 
Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; 
the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea." If 
one objects to the aristocratic tinge, the high rank, in this 
"ballad" as well as in the song of Jephthah's daughter, 
one can turn to another scene, where "it came to pass 
. . . when David returned from the slaughter of the Phi- 
listine, that the women came out of all the cities of Israel, 
singing and dancing, to meet king Saul . . . And the 
women sang one to another in their play, and said, 
" Saul hath slain his thousands, 
And David his ten thousands." * 
There is popular refrain ; and the narrative improvisation 
can be inferred. It is all democratic and communal 
enough. Like these women, too, Gothic matrons and 
maidens streamed out from their village in a throng to 
greet Attila with songs, dancing the while and waving 
their uplifted veils. A distinctly historical ballad was 
not only sung in choral by Franks of the seventh cen- 
tury, but, so the chronicler declares, was actually there 
"composed by the women as they danced and clapped 
their hands." Women, indeed, seem everywhere ad- 

1 1 Sam. xviii. For the other extract, Exod. xv, Lowth has some ex- 
cellent comment on the "answered:" De sacra Poes. Hebr., ed. Rosen- 
mtiller, pp. 205 ff. 



WOMEN AS SINGERS OF VICTORY 49 

v 

dieted to this choral composition of verse; and in the 
case just mentioned the song became traditional. Com- 
ponebant, however, is a rare word in these reports ; and 
the fact of composition has to be inferred by analogy 
with the Frankish song, the ballad of the Faroe fisher- 
man, and many convincing cases from ethnology. Tra- 
dition is all that can be inferred from Barbour's well- 
know^ statement about a certain fight in Eskdale. 
Particulars, he remarks, 1 he need not give, because — 

" Young wemen, quhen thai will play, 
Syng it emang thame ilke day." 

So with the forged chronicle of Croyland when it says 
that "women and maidens sang in their dance" the 
exploits of Hereward. In neither case, however, is in- 
cidental improvisation to be denied. 

The fact of ballads seems clear enough for old times, 
and choral composition is to be inferred; but we have 
restored no bridge from our balladry back to the original 
individual versions. We found no real stay in old epic, 
and no direct choral origins. We shall find as little help 
in the mention of actual sources, or in the suspicion of 
them, obtained from early historians; the "ballads" 
which they name, or quote, or seem to quote, cannot be 
defined save in the most general terms. They may have 
been genuine traditional ballads, even choral fragments; 

1 Bruce, ed. Skeat, E. E. T. Soc, p. 399. For other cases, and the 
Frankish song just cited, see the present author's Old English Ballads, 
Introduction, pp. Ixxvi ff. 



50 THE BALLAD 

they may have been songs of the gleeman and the pro- 
fessional bard. What, to begin with, were those ballads 
of Randolph, Earl of Chester ? What were the Hereward 
songs, and all the outlaw cycles? Who made them? 
And even if we could trace them to tradition, could we 
be sure that they were structurally of the traditional type ? 
Were they of the minstrel or of the people ? Or were they 
made in the old warrior fashion by the men who them- 
selves did the deeds and lived the stirring outlaw life? 
Minstrels are not a remote conjecture for some cases. 
Randolph is actually said to have been rescued by a 
" rabble of minstrels," to have given them privileges, and 
to have been sung by them. Waltheof, contemporary with 
Hereward as well as with Eadric the Wild, was sung, 
says Freeman, "in the warlike songs of the tongues of 
both his parents;" but one of these songs is preserved 
and is plainly by a minstrel, a scald, with no trace of the 
popular ballad about it. The account of Waltheof s 
doughty deeds at York given by William of Malmesbury, 
a fine bit of description, Freeman thinks to be plainly 
taken "from a ballad." What sort of ballad? Henry 
of Huntingdon takes an account of the battle of Brunan- 
burh from a "ballad," too; but the source in this case 
is easily recognized as that fine battle-poem in the Chron- 
icle, and is no ballad at all. William of Malmesbury 
tells explicitly of his own use of ballads, and comments 
on their value as historical material. He distinguishes 
carefully between earlier trustworthy information that he 
got from written documents and the evidence that he 



v SOURCES OF CHRONICLES 51 

must now take from " ballads — cantilenae — crumbled 
by the successive rubbings of time." What were these 
cantilenae? Three centuries later, Blind Harry, Henry 
the Minstrel, was singing "the things commonly related" 
of William Wallace before men of high rank, and getting 
"food and raiment" for his pains. Maior, the old his- 
torian, will give only "partial credit" to such writings. 
But the extant "Wallace" with its learned style, its 
couplets of description often as crisp as Chaucer's, is 
absolutely without the popular note; if a minstrel wrote 
it he was a learned man. So, too, the direct inference 
of traditional ballads in Malmesbury's case is open to 
very grave doubt. Professor Child, discussing the ballad 
of "Gude Wallace" and its obvious source in the poem 
ascribed to Blind Harry, suggests that this poem itself 
was founded on earlier ballads not unlike "Gude Wal- 
lace" itself, the wheel thus coming full circle. But in 
the case of kings and prominent men, the old court poet, 
the minstrel, is always to be suspected. Even Lava- 
mon, who heard many old songs in his story-haunted 
land by the Severn and let them mingle with his book- 
lore to make the tale of the "Brut," usually suggests 
a gleeman of some sort when he alludes to popular 
verse. He tells, 1 for example, of songs of praise when 
"the king's eldest son came to the hustings and was 
lifted to king;" when a king returns to his army, and 

1 See, in the order of citation, verses 1-4641, 19212, 220T7, 30608, and 
9538. "Said in song" is the "carping" such as Thomas Rymer used, 
the ideal gleeman of Scottish tradition. 



52 THE BALLAD 

"horns were blown and gleemen sang;" while a vic- 
torious army was marching home under Arthur, "and 
then sang the men wondrous lays of Arthur the king, 
and of his chieftains, and said in song, never in world 
was king like Arthur;" in a charming little scene on 
shipboard, how "the sea and the sun, wind and the 
wide-sea, were glad, and the flood bore the ships, and 
the singers (scopas) were singing;" and how, after a 
treaty of peace, "there were in this land blissful songs." 
Only one of these cases is obviously choral. It was 
always the gleeman's business and profit, so the famous 
conclusion of "Widsith " shows, to sing in praise of 
great men. Blame, too, was his business as a jour- 
nalist, when it was at long range. Two centuries after 
Layamon, in the so-called prophecy, really a retrospect, 
of John of Bridlington, 1 the Scottish king, David, is 
held up to obloquy as one who is going to be sung and 
harped for his evil courses ; and the exposition notes that 
minstrels, "as they were wont to sing the deeds of good 
warriors, must sing also the shameful and luxurious 
doings of this David." These prophecies and their like 
became popular enough. Contemporary satire attacked 

1 The text is interesting. Psalletur David luxuria festis, says the 
prophecy; and the exposition: quia sic solebant ministralli dicer e opera 
strenua ct bellicosa bonorum militum, ita de isto David facient gesta 
luxoriosa. — Wright, Polit. Poems, i, 143. For a mixture of various 
prophecies, popular enough and traditional, see the third "fytt" of 
Thomas of Erceldoune ; chap-books embodying these were common 
in Scottish farmhouses down to the nineteenth century. — Murray, 
Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, E. E. T. S., 1875, 
pp. ii, xlii. 



v JOURNALISM AGAIN 53 

high places; the commons were quick enough to hold 
a king responsible for dearth, injustice, and all manner of 
wrongs, and liked to sing or quote sharp verses of com- 
plaint. It is sheer folly, However, to range this sort of 
poem, popular as it may have been, with traditional 
ballads; and even on lower levels, in the satires on the 
monks and friars, the complaints about landlords, the 
moan over taxes, which come down to us as the voice 
of an oppressed people, we are simply to see the verse of 
some humble poet who makes himself the mouthpiece 
of the folk. We do not call the vision about Piers the 
Plowman a series of popular ballads. Traditional bal- 
lads tell a story, or else give a situation, story and situa- 
tion each for its own sake; the lyric element is confined 
to what one may awkwardly call the singable qualities; 
and any ulterior purpose, any subjective hint, even 
when subjectivity is of the throng, takes a poem at 
once out of the ballad file. 

Even on strictly narrative ground, and in a case where 
identity of subject-matter is supposed to link an acknow- 
ledged ballad to a lost source of chronicle or poem, we 
can draw no final conclusion. Identity of subject cannot 
carry with it identity of structure and form. The popu- 
lar ballad of "Sir Aldingar" tells a story agreeing in 
many respects with the account which Malmesbury gives 
of Gunhild, daughter of Cnut and wife of the German 
Henry III; "nor can we doubt,'' says Professor Child, 
"that William is citing a ballad." But we hear in the 
fourteenth century of such a ballad in professional 



54 THE BALLAD 

hands. In 1338 the prior of St. Swithin's at Winchester 
entertained his bishop by letting a minstrel, a joculator, 
sing in hall the ballad of Emma, Gunhild's mother, 
who triumphed in her ordeal for adultery. During the 
progress of this ordeal the spectators are represented as 
praying for the queen and exhorting her to be firm. 
A refrain, Dieu vous save, Dame Emme, seems to belong 
to a version of this ballad and was sung by the common 
laborer in the days of " Piers Plowman." * If we had no 
better evidence, we should be tempted to hand over "Sir 
Aldingar" to Herbert the minstrel. 

It is the old dilemma. In the lack of actual material, 
any theory can be proved. If the minstrel is favored by 
one account, other evidence is soon found to over- 
whelm and bury him out of sight. From the earliest 
medieval times, "ballads" were made and sung in danc- 
ing by the throng, and from the earliest medieval times 
songs about men and events were made by the minstrel. 
From the nature of the case, communal verse was not 

1 See Warton, Hist. Eng. Poetry, ed. 1840, pp. 81, 82, who is quoting 
"an antient register of the priory." The name of the minstrel is given, 
— Herbertus, — and he sings also a local ballad of Colbrand whom Guy 
had conquered just outside of the city. It is noteworthy for the popular 
side of these ballads that, as Warton remarks, the Colbrand story 
"remained in rude painting against the walls of the north transept of 
the cathedral till within my memory." Further, one is interested in 
Warton's quotation from the directions of William of Wykeham in re- 
gard to his scholars at New College. They were to have a fire in the hall 
after dinner and there sing songs, recite poems, and the like. These 
cantilenae were to include the chronicles, regnorum chronicas. (War- 
ton, p. 84.) 



THE BANNOCKBURN FRAGMENTS 55 

recorded ; but the recorded verse of the minstrel is never 
of the sort found in our traditional ballads. To say that 
this antithesis proves the communal source of ballads 
is manifestly wrong. Only a reasonable probability 
springs from the facts at our command on these lines 
of investigation, and proof must be sought elsewhere. 
Some of the material, indeed, which has been arrayed 
for the support of communal origins, proves too much. 
The two flytings of English and Scotch soldiers in the 
war of 1296 are mere taunting songs, with little trace, 
save in the second, of a choral; and they have, of course, 
no epic touch whatever. Fabyan's account of the songs 
that were made after Bannockburn "in daunces,in the 
carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland," is 
damaged, not so much by the collocation, which prob- 
ably means that everybody was making songs about 
the fight, as by the specimen of the verse itself. Marlowe 
inserted it, as "a jig" made "by the fleering Scots," in 
his "Edward II." The refrain is popular, a kind of 
water-chorus used by sailors and oarsmen; and what is 
it doing, one may ask, in that galley ? The text is unepic; 
it is of the taunt or flyting order; it is remote from 
balladry of the traditional kind; and it is suspiciously 
like the work of that "professional song- writer of his 
age," as Wright calls him, Laurence Minot. 

" Skottes out of Berwik and of Abirdene, 
At the Bannokburn war ye to kene" . . . 

runs his taunt on the vengeance taken by the third 
Edward for the second Edward's disgrace. This verse 



56 THE BALLAD 

of Minot's, too, has a kind of refrain; it is very singable; 

the vocative note is dominant, and narrative is reduced 

to mere allusion. There is no traditional touch. It is 

what was "sung this year," journalistic lyric. Very 

similar is Fabyan's fragment: — 

" Maydens of Englande, sore may you mourne 
For your lemmans ye have lost at Bannockisburn, 

With heve a lowe. 
What, weeneth the king of England 
So soone to have won Scotland! 

With rumbylowe." 

Perhaps the maidens of Scotland are responsible for 
the gibe about lost lovers; but at best this is only a burr 
of political song that has stuck to the coats of chronicle. 
It does nothing for the traditional ballad. 

Minot ceased to sing about 1350; in 1388 was fought 
the fight responsible for two of our finest ballads. Here 
tradition has done its perfect work; but what of the 
original stuff? The alliteration in the "Cheviot" and 
in "Otterburn" is noticeable, along with remains of a 
peculiar stanzaic arrangement. Minot hunts the letter 
with positive frenzy. "Sir Edward oure cumly king" is 
close to the Robin Hood phrase. Did some minstrel like 
Minot make the ballads ? Again one must leap to no 
conclusion of this sort. It is true that the bulk of the 
old border ballads, along with the Robin Hood cycle 
and a few others, must be put in a class far advanced in 
narrative skill and scope beyond the traditional domestic 
ballads that best represent the type; but the former are 
cast in the ballad mould, differ in spirit, rhythm, metre, 



WHO MADE THE BORDER BALLADS? 57 

style, both from old minstrel songs and from lyric 
of the Minot variety, and, moreover, can be attributed 
to a definite source on fairly definite authority. The 
border ballads seem to have been made, as Mr. Andrew 
Lang pointed out, by the borderers themselves. As with 
warriors of Germanic and early English days, so these 
fighting men made their own songs. Leslie * says they 
"delyt mekle in thair awne musick and Harmonie in 
singing quhilke of the actes of thair foirbearis thay 
have leired or quhat thame selfes have invented of ane 
ingenious policie to dryve a pray and say thair prayeris." 
The bishop's Latin is really more to the point, with his 
cantiones, — quas de majorum gestis,aut ingeniosis prae- 
dandi precandive stratagematis , ipsi conftngunt. This 
is unequivocal; ipsi conftngunt is plain talk. The bor- 
derers, then, made songs about their ancestors' raids 
and about their own; so do primitive folk all over the 
world. 2 Warriors, particularly, who have the communal 
feeling as in the intense clannishness of the border, or 
in the days of Germanic bands united by that most 
characteristic Germanic institution, the comitatus, sing 
their deeds with the same inevitableness that marks the 

1 See his Historie of Scotland wrytten -first in Latin . . . and trans- 
lated in Scottish by Father James Dalrymple, 1596, edited for the Scot- 
tish Text Soc, 1888, i, 101 f. 

2 See, below, the ballad Lads of Wamphray discussed for its earlier 
marks of structure and style. In the Defense of Poesy, just after the praise 
of "the old song of Percy and Douglas," Sidney says: "In Hungary 
I have seen it the manner at all feasts and other such meetings, to have 
songs of their ancestors' valor." 



58 THE BALLAD 

doing of them. It is thus possible to put " Otterburn " 
and the " Cheviot" in line with songs which fighting men 
sang about their own deeds in England a thousand 
years ago; but the line is only a vague and faint tracing, 
it concerns only a small group of ballads in the collec- 
tions, and it touches only the subject-matter and the 
conditions of making, not structure, style, and metrical 
form, not the qualities that go to mark off one poetic 
species from another. 

The first glimpse of actual ballad structure and the 
ballad's metrical form, which is to be met in English 
records, has an interest of its own; but even this does 
little towards solving the ballad problem. We see, to be 
sure, how those border ballads in their original shape 
could have been improvised under choral conditions; 
for here at last are the ballad style, the rhythm, prob- 
ably the refrain, and, moreover, direct testimony that 
the fragment was a favorite in really popular tradition. 
The tale must be told at length. 1 Cnut, with his queen 
Emma and divers of the great nobles (optimatibus regni), 
was coming by boat to Ely; and, as they neared land, 
the king stood up, and told his men to row slowly while 
he looked at the great church and listened to the song 
of the monks which came sweetly over the water. "Then 
he called all who were with him in the boats to make a 
circle about him, and in the gladness of his heart he bade 
them join him in song, and he composed in English a 
ballad (cantilenam) which begins as follows, — 

1 From "Historia Eliensis," ii, 27, in Gale, Hist. Script, i, 505. 



CNUT'S "BALLAD" 59 

" Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely, 
Tha Cnut ching rew ther by. 

" 'Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land, 
And here we thes muneches sang.' " 

The chronicler turns this into Latin, saying then, with 
unmistakable reference to popular tradition, " and so 
the rest, as it is sung in these days by the people in their 
dances, and handed down as proverbial." 

We may chip and cut, with critical knives, from this 
pretty story as we will. Cnut himself may go, precisely as 
Alfred is sundered from his proverbs; and the modern 
look of the words may take them well hitherward out of 
the eleventh century; what remains is a fragment which 
is not only one of the earliest pieces of verse to break 
away from the stichic order of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but 
is in the metre and the rhythm which belong to the best 
popular ballads. The story of Cnut's making is highly 
interesting as a true process if not a true fact; for it 
was evidently a method of poetical composition which 
excited no comment and was familiar to the twelfth- 
century writer of the chronicle. If verses were impro- 
vised then, under choral conditions, in the rhythm of 
the traditional ballads which begin to be recorded a 
couple of Centuries later, there is every reason to think 
of such a process and such a result lying behind that 
formula of ipsi conflngunt which Leslie, an eye-witness, 
affirms for border verse of the sixteenth century when our 
best traditional ballads were making. Better even than 
the making, than the improvisation along with choral 



60 THE BALLAD 

song, is the popular transmission of these verses of the 
king; the singing and dancing by the people, the tradi- 
tional note, are even more to the purpose. Grundtvig has 
shown that the quoted lines are very probably the burden 
or chorus of the song itself, which may have carried them 
throughout, along with the improvised narrative verses * 
which followed, or else let them alternate as full chorus 
after each new stanza; and he gives many similar cases 
from old Scandinavian tradition. Of the song itself there 
is so little left that little can be inferred. It may be a 
mere refrain, a rowing-chorus such as one finds, however 
irrelevant it seems there, in the Bannockburn verses, and 
in many Danish ballads; but one would like to hear 
the rest of the piece as "still sung by the people in their 
dances." The main point is that here for the first time 
occurs that two-line stanza in which so many of the oldest 
English and Scandinavian ballads are composed. 2 In 
a sense, Cnut's song is the beginning of recorded English 
balladry; 3 but it is balladry from the warrior caste, 

1 Grundtvig thinks the missing verses were epic, and told of Cnut's 
conquest, — a chronicle-ballad in the grand style. 

2 Nearly all English ballads are either in this measure, — couplets 
of four accents in each verse, — which seems by Professor Usener's 
showing to have been the prevailing measure for early popular poetry 
everywhere, or else in the so-called "ballad" measure, a stanza of four 
verses with four accents in the first and third, and three in the second 
and fourth. The couplet is undoubtedly the older form; and if we add 
to it the refrain as alternate verse, we have also a stanza of four verses. 

3 Some tradition of Cnut's improvisation was obviously connected 
with the words of a favorite song at rural dances; and so came the cir- 
cumstantial account. 



MtSCONCEPTIONS OF THE PROBLEM 61 

and of the chronicle or epic type, rather than of domestic 
tradition; and while it gives a glimpse of the trans- 
mitting folk of the countryside, its story of origin is 
obviously conventional and based upon surmise. 

IV. SPECIFIC MARKS OF THE BALLAD 

Between definition by origins and definition by desti- 
nation no choice is to be reached by attempting to follow 
our popular ballads back through the fifteenth century 
and so to connect them with song and heroic lay of 
medieval times. It remains, then, to study the ballad 
itself, and determine whether it was primarily of a piece 
with those forms of verse which are conceded to popular 
origins. What are the specific marks of the ballad ? What 
is there in the structure, the style, the setting, and the 
conditions of it, which must refer it either to ennobled 
popular improvisation or to degenerate art ? 

Before these questions are answered, however, there 
is a bit of house-cleaning to be done. Rubbish left by 
the romantic school is still to be swept away, and facts 
must be set in their place again, whence they have been 
pushed by the modern school of common sense in 
hysterics. There is no miracle, no mystery even, to be 
assumed for the making of the ballad, which was com- 
posed originally, as any other poem is composed, by the 
rhythmic and imaginative efforts of a human mind. The 
differencing factors lie in the conditions of the process, 
and not in the process for itself. Again, all that can be 
recovered by a reconstruction of these conditions is the 



62 THE BALLAD 

poetic form, the ballad as ballad, and not the original 
poetic product. It should be cried from the housetops 
that no one expects to find in the ballads of the collec- 
tions anything which springs directly from the ancient 
source. Apart from literary influences, there is the great 
factor of oral tradition, which has made over and over 
again the stuff of communal song. Stripped, then, of 
these old reproaches, our search is anything but a fan- 
tastic attempt. Nothing could be more practical and 
sensible than inquiry into the origins of that poetic 
species which oral tradition has chosen as the form of 
its favorite narrative themes, and nothing could be more 
scientific, by way of determining these origins, than a 
study of the form itself. Confusion of the two problems, 
form and product, is absurd. Nothing is done for the 
study of the ballad as a literary species when one has 
attributed " Kinmont Willie" to Scott and the better part 
of ''Tarn Lane" to Burns; one has simply settled two 
interesting questions of detail, and has merely proved 
that the form of the ballad can be fairly well imitated. 
The problem of the species still remains ; and it remains 
unsolved even after the next and obvious step of assum- 
ing that all ballads are simply the late appropriation by 
the lower classes of poetry once made for the upper 
classes or for the learned and the reading world. An in- 
genious study * has recently appeared to show how illiter- 
ate folk even now appropriate in this way some poem, 

1 John Meier, Kunstlieder im Volksmunde, Halle, 1906; see pp. 
xix ff. 



CORRUPTION IX TRANSMISSION 63 

changing and corrupting it almost beyond recognition. 
Nobody denies this process. Here, for example, in the 
question-column of a widely read newspaper. 1 is a 
query which the editor does not answer. Where is the 
poem, asks a correspondent. " in which these lines occur? 

" I thank whatever gods there be 

For my unconquerable soul. 
I have not shrunk or cried aloud 

Beneath the bludgeonings of fate. 
My head is bloody but unbowed. 

I am the master of my fate. 
I am the captain of my soul.'" 

To such a case, at the shortest possible range of tradi- 
tion and in a world of printed things, has come Henley's 
poem! The grasp of thought and phrase, the lapse in 
stanza and rime, are very interesting: the inquirer is an 
educated person. On lower levels, as Child points out, 
and under oral conditions, the confusion lays hold of 
word and idea: "they cast their glamourie o'er her.''' 
in "The Gypsy Laddie." becomes "they called their 
grandmother over:" and the "consecrated cross-eyed 
bear" of the little girl's hymn comes into mind. But 
this Malaprop theory of the ballad as a distorted poem 
of art will never do. It is very simple. German editors 
tell of "folksongs" that are simply Schiller or Uhland 
with a difference, and sometimes a very great difference. 
And there is Dr. John Meier's case of a mawkish poem 
which he thinks is to settle the ballad question out of 
hand. In these verses, written about 1TS1 by a German 
1 Philadelphia Eve) Nov. 16. 1906. 



64 THE BALLAD 

nobleman named Von Stamford, "Fair Annie" is spin- 
ning to a song of pure drivel, which she exchanges for 
dialogue even more drivelish as a young knight comes 
up and asks her to go to his castle. She rejects his silks 
and satins, but counters deftly by asking him to put 
down his name for a contribution in relief of a distressed 
neighbor. She describes the distress, and bursts into 
tears; the knight — 

. . . "husch! im Wagen 
Befahl da von zu jagen "... 

and the poem ends with advice for all 1 girls under such 
temptation to use the same means of escape. The num- 
ber and variety of versions of this mawkish poem which 
sprang up among unlettered German folk can only 
wake our wonder. But what do they prove? Precisely 
what is proved by the game of gossip, where a story is 
whispered from ear to ear in a large circle of players ; by 
the versions of any oral tradition, verse or prose; and 
even by trie manuscript copies of a widely read poem. 
They solve no problem of origins; they only illustrate 
the process of transmission. So we go back to our inquiry 
after the specific marks of the ballad, and essay the va- 
rious tests which are commonly supposed to determine it. 
Ballads, then, like folk song, chorals of labor, and pop- 
ular verse generally, are handed down by oral # tradition; 
and we have seen that this traditional quality is thought 
by some writers to be the only ballad test. But it leaves 
the question of origins untouched. It accounts for the 
many variants, the versions more or less diverging in stuff 



ORAL TRADITION 65 

and style, of a given ballad, and for all the peculiarities 
which that sort of transmission must bring about; but 
it will not account for the original ballads or for most of 
those specific qualities which set them off from poetry of 
art. Whosoever tries to make tradition account for these 
things, stretches its powers beyond all belief; and a far 
simpler explanation is at hand. Tradition, of course, is 
an absolute test in exclusion ; the popular ballad of our 
collection must be, or, like the old printed versions, 
must once have been, transmitted in this way; but all 
traditional verse is not ballad, and much of it differs 
radically. A recent printed collection of deplorably low 
songs can be put to good use in illustrating this difference. 
We see not only how four or five genuine ballads stick 
fiery off from the sooty mass, but also how this under- 
ground spreading of songs, which are written in many a 
case by known authors, fails to divest them of the per- 
sonal and artistic note. Like that mawkish, sentimental, 
feebly didactic poem which became, save the mark, a 
"folk song" in Germany, so a wanton song by Burns 
or another, impossible for decent print, spreads with 
changes, and often very great changes, among lovers of 
the unlovely, until between a couple of versions here, or 
between these and a copy in some manuscript collection, 
there is hardly relationship left. So it is with ballad 
versions. But this vital distinction remains, not only that 
the song can be traced to its author back from the various 
versions under popular control, and that the ballad can- 
not be so traced, but also that the song, in all its windings 



66 THE BALLAD 

and variations of fact and phrase, still bears the mark 
of individual authorship and differs in no specific way 
from its original, while the ballad, however far it be 
followed back, is still a poem specifically different from 
the poem of known authors. In other words, both cases 
of variation are due to mainly oral, traditional record, 
but no trait of the ballad as a species, whether in structure, 
in style, in form, or in general spirit, is due to this varia- 
tion so as to disappear as one approaches its supposed 
personal source. Tradition in itself will not explain the 
ballad. 1 What it does explain we shall see in the 
chapter on Sources. 

This impersonal quality of ballads as a species is in 
no way disturbed by the use of the first person. The 
cases are comparatively few, and the "I" is even then 
extrinsic, perfunctory, not personal in a real sense. Bal- 
lads of the broadside kind, telling of adventure by bands 
of men, armies, or the like, use the first person plural. 2 
The singer of the ballad pretends now and then to have 
seen the characters and heard their talk: 3 "By Arthur's 

1 There is no need to point out the personal note of the folk song as 
compared with the impersonal note of the ballad. For particular con- 
trasts, however, one may note Bonny Bee Horn, Child, no. 92, and its 
related "song," The Lowlands of Holland; further Jamie Douglas, 
no. 204, and the song Waly, Waly. Folk songs, kittle cattle to shoe in 
any case, are uncommonly baffling in English records. 

2 So nos. 164, 285. 

3 Nos. 92, 55, 188, 163, A, 38, 183; see also 108, and 111, — a 
"minstrel ballad" out and out. The minstrel is audible enough, and 
his "I" is very bold, in ballads like the Rising in the North', 175; but 
in 182 he is only the singer, not the maker. 



THE "I" OF THE BALLADS 67 

Dale as late I went," or "On the dawning of the day, I 
heard two brothers make their moan," or "As I came in 
by Dunidier," or "As I was walking all alone." More 
remotely, as in the very old ballad of "Robyn and 
Gandelyn," the singer hears "a carping of a clerk," 
that is, the story of a bookman, a scholar, an authority; 
and he proceeds to tell what he heard told. What he 
tells, however, is a genuinely popular and traditional 
ballad with its refrain. So with the dream-opening, so 
familiar in medieval literature; "As I was cast in my 
first sleep" is the beginning of a disordered ballad, 
"Young Andrew." The harmless character of this "I" 
of the singer or reciter comes out admirably in the fourth 
stanza of "Lord Lovel" — the version of the Percy 
papers, taken down from singing: — 

"He called up his stable-groom, 
To saddle his milkwhite steed; 
Dey down, dey down, dey down derry down, 
I wish Lord Lovill good speed" . . . 

There is an amusing interpolation of the singer in "Young 
Beichan." Still less significance attaches to the "I" of 
a dramatic story such as is told by the victim of "Alison 
Gross," or begun by Mary Hamilton; x in the latter case, 
and in "The Flower of Serving Men," "I" turns into 
"she." In quoted stanzas, indeed, the egotism does not 
count; and nobody grudges the reciter of long-winded bal- 
lads his occasional "I tell you in certain." The ballad ego, 
on the whole, has nothing to say to the question of origins. 
1 No. 173, E. See also 36, The Laily Worm, which is "pure tradition." 



68 THE BALLAD 

Traditional, objective, impersonal, as they are, ballads 
must also tell a definite tale. Although this is a test 
common to all epic verse, it acquires peculiar significance 
for the ballads on account of their community of interest, 
which gathers scattered versions from all times and lands 
into groups that again seem to form an almost definite 
and coherent whole. No account of these mutual rela- 
tions, however broadly sketched, can do justice to them 
in comparison with a single but comprehensive study 
like Professor Child's introduction to "Lady Isabel and 
the Elf-Knight." And yet, for all the community of 
material, and for all the rigid objectivity in treatment of 
it, ballads cannot be set off in these terms from narrative 
and objective poetry of art. Ballads, like folk tales, share 
some of their stories, their subject and motive, with lit- 
erature, and at times in a relation of dependence. "King 
Orfeo," of course, is the old story of Orpheus and Eury- 
dice; Hero and Leander were made to tell their tale of 
woe again in southern and northwestern Europe; "Sir 
Hugh" and the Prioress's story in Chaucer deal with 
the same essential facts, and spring practically from the 
same legend. Ballads have, as a rule, better claims to 
priority than the romance can offer; but there are un- 
doubted instances where, so far as material is concerned, 
ballads derive from the romance. It is true that ballads 
as they lie before us seem to exist for the sake of their 
story, and for no other pervasive purpose; but ballads 
have not always been what they are. Despite its rank as 
necessary condition, narrative is not a fixed, fundamental, 



THE NARRATIVE TEST 69 

primary fact in the ballad scheme. The ballad was not 
exclusively epic from its start, as was the heroic lay. The 
greatest ballads affect us not by the story itself but by 
the way in which the story is told; and this "way" is 
not narrative art at high pitch. Narrative art at high 
pitch we get in the prose sagas of Iceland; they are 
literature, literature "just on the autumnal verge;" 1 the 
moment that one brings even the best ballads into con- 
trast with these sagas, one ceases to boast about nar- 
rative art as the test of balladry, and one casts about 
for other explanation of the charm which pervades a 
"Babylon" or a "Sir Patrick Spens." It will not do to 
say that ballads are artless narrative, and charm by 
their artlessness, while the saga is art itself; artless nar- 
rative is best studied in the popular tale. This marchen, 
again, itself as old as any aesthetic propensity in man, 
will do nothing for the origins of balladry; it follows 
an entirely different line and springs from an entirely 
different impulse, as any observer can determine for 
himself who watches the same group of children, now 

1 Ker, Epic and Romance, p. 235. The sagas, he says, pp. 241 f., "are 
the last stage in a progress from the earliest mythical imagination and 
the earliest dirges and encomiums of the great men of a tribe to a con- 
sistent and orderly form of narrative literature, attained by the direction 
of a critical faculty . . . the great victory of the Humanities in the 
North, at the end of a long process of education." If, now, Professor 
Ker remarks that "the ballad poetry of the Faroes is derived from 
Icelandic literary traditions" (pp. 324 f.),he must limit this derivation 
to narrative material, and — see above, p. 24 — make even that only 
partial. The ballad genesis is more plainly proved for the Faroes than 
for any other modern people. 



70 THE BALLAD 

playing "Ring round the Rosy," or what not, singing 
and shouting in concert with clasped hands and con- 
senting feet, now sitting silent, absorbed, while some one 
tells them a story. As with the manner, so with the 
material. No test can be obtained for the ballad by a 
comparison of its matter with these tales which have long 
formed the flotsam and jetsam of European narrative. 
The actual community of subject in ballad and folk tale 
is limited. Ballads rest primarily on situation and deed 
of familiar, imitable type; the popular tale, untram- 
meled by rhythmic law, by choral conditions, tends to 
a more subtle motive, a more striking fact, a more 
unexpected, memorable quality, and a more intricate 
coherence of events. 

Stories and poetical forms, moreover, stand in no 
mutual relation of cause and effect. The point is clear that 
when one has traced the story of a given ballad, one has 
by no means settled the origins of ballads as a poetic 
genre. Professor Child's introduction to "Lady Isabel 
and the Elf- Knight" shows the manifold migrations of 
a ballad-subject, and Professor Bugge's essay 1 on the 
Orpheus and Eurydice motive disposes of the idea that 
in such cases the ballads and the legend itself were both 
branches of an old myth. But grant that a ballad, " Har- 
pens Kraft," was really made about the year 1400 by a 
Scandinavian singer, who got it from a traditional German 
version, into which he put certain features, which, in 
their turn, came from Scotland or England to the Danes; 
1 "Harpens Kraft," in Arhiv for Nord. FU. 9 vii, 97 ff. (1891). 



SOURCE OF PLOT AND ORIGIN OF FORM 71 

suppose that all this ballad material goes back, through 
English versions of the late thirteenth century, to a 
romance composed about 1200 by a Breton poet, who 
retold it, "with Celtic touches," from the old medieval 
Latin tradition, whither it had come from the classics! 
So we run a fine chase, through wild country, and are 
more or less sure — until the next hunt — that we have 
kept the trail notwithstanding very feeble scent; the fox 
nobody dreams of finding. 1 Actually, too, we have 
acquired valuable information about the migration of 
a good story. But of the origins of that particular form 
of poetry to which this subject turned when it was 
embodied in ballads like "Harpens Kraft," or the Shet- 
land "King Orfeo," we have learned no more than we 
have learned of the origins of epic, of romance, of popular 
tale. We still confront the problem of the ballad as a 
poetic genre. 

V. THE BALLAD STRUCTURE 

The differencing quality of the ballad of tradition lies 
not in its subject, which may be anything, not in its 
setting, which may be anywhere, but in its actual struc- 
ture. Structure, moreover, must not be misunderstood 
as style. Manner, style, what is vaguely called the note 
of ballads, is indeed characteristic and may be unique; 
but it is not the fundamental fact. The ballad, of course, 
like any real lyric, must be sung, it must have a tune; 
and this tune, usually rustic, unsophisticated, is provo- 
1 See the chapter on Sources. 



72 THE BALLAD 

cative as well as reminiscent of accompanying steps; 
but the same thing is true of many a song utterly foreign 
to the ballad. The ballad, as its name implies, was 
originally inseparable from the dance; but othe^ forms 
of verse were also choral, and the proof of origin in the 
dance itself must be made, and presently will be made, 
by more direct proof than this wavering line of connection. 
So, too, with that other "rustic" note of simplicity, the 
use of common words in common order, and the lack of 
all figurative and tropical language; while characteristic 
of the ballad, this is not its essential mark of structure. 
Simplicity, moreover, is a very equivocal word. The 
Icelandic sagas are simple, and so is a lyric of Words- 
worth; but the ballads are not simple in this artistic 
way. William Blake wrote simple lyric verse, and he 
has the ballad note of repetition; but his lines about 
the piper piping down the valleys give no ballad effect, 
while a single phrase — 

" O sunflower, weary of time," — 

beautiful as it is, carries an inference of pathos and 
reflection that the ballad never knew. Indeed, it is the 
thought and meaning of the ballads which are simple, 
rather than their expression; for while Matthew Arnold 
wrote very wildly about the ballads' "slang," he was 
right in attributing to them a dialect of their own; and 
this dialect is not simple in the severest sense of the 
word. 

Rudeness or roughness, whatever quality superficial 



SIMPLICITY AND RUDENESS 73 

critics contrast in ballads with the smoothness of art, is 
even farther from the mark. It is true that they plunge 
often into the heart of the subject, without a word of 
explanation. "It begins in the fifth act of the play," 
was Gray's admiring comment on a version of "Child 
Maurice;" and Dr. Johnson thought that Gray him- 
self stole ballad thunder for the opening of his "Bard." 
"This abruptness has nothing new in it. . . . Nay, we 
have it in the old song of Johnny Armstrong." But 
roughness of the stylistic sort, rude rimes and metres, 
are not essential. Cromek 1 says " it was once the opinion 
of Burns that a poet of a nice ear and fine taste might 
compose songs without the incumbrance of rhyme. He 
was led into this error by the seeming dissonance of many 
of them in this necessary appendage." But imperfect 
rimes do not even characterize the ballad in general, and 
are often apparent only to the eye; it need hardly be 
added that rhythm in actual ballads, as they were 
sung, is always exact to a fault, however the record may 
distort it. 

Neither the vague test of simplicity nor the false test 
of imperfect rhythm and rime will do. We must look 
deeper into the case, and find tests that are organic. 
The refrain is an organic part of the ballad; it is of great 
structural importance ; and under certain conditions it 
comes close to the requisite test. It establishes beyond 
all doubt the lyric and choral origins. Ballads were 

1 Remains of Xithsdale and Galloway Song, London, 1810, p. vi, — 
quoting from another work. 



74 THE BALLAD 

at first always sung, 1 and always had a refrain; 2 the 
refrain is incontestably sprung from singing of the peo- 
ple at dance, play, work, going back to that choral 
repetition which seems to have been the protoplasm of 
all poetry. Refrains, of course, hold fast in oral tradition, 
but tend to drop from the record, where text and nar- 
rative verses play the only important part. If, now, one 
finds a ballad made up of verses and a constant refrain, 
is it not fair to assume that both belong to the same 
source, and that written composition of the text is far less 
likely than improvisation in the throng, which is demon- 
strably responsible for the refrain itself? Indeed, the 
fact of ballads made in this way stands beyond doubt. 3 

1 For the singing of a given ballad, say The Fair Flower of Northum- 
berland, no. 9, see Deloney, work quoted, p. 195; the maidens "in dul- 
cet manner chanted out this song, two of them singing the Ditty and 
all the rest bearing the burden." This is before king and queen; but 
the process was doubtless the same as in humbler cases. "The oxygen 
and hydrogen," announced a lecturer heard by royalty, "will now have 
the honor of amalgamating in the presence of your Royal Highness." 

2 This is proved by Professor Steenstrup, Vore Folkeviser, pp. 75 ff . 
Out of 502 Scandinavian ballads which he examined, only 20 lacked a 
refrain. In English, owing to the increase of chronicle ballads, the 
figures are not so striking; but they tell the same tale. Of the 305 bal- 
lads in Child's collection, 106 show in some version evidence of chorus 
or refrain. Of some 1250 versions in all, about 300 have a refrain; but 
among the old ballads in couplets, out of 31 only 7 lack the refrain as 
they stand, and even these show traces of it. In the German ballads 
refrains are even less evident; but the tendency to chronicle ballads, 
which of course are recited and need no refrain, and the preponderance 
of rival folk song, explain easily this decadence of the choral element. 
Wolf has placed beyond doubt the popular origin of refrains: see his 
Lais, etc., pp. 27, 191. 

3 See the Faroe ballad described above, p. 24. 






BALLAD ORIGINS DEFINED 75 

Basing one's assertion on these elements of recurrent 
refrain and alternate improvisation, one could safely 
define the ballad, by origins, as a narrative lyric made 
and sung at the dance and handed down in popular 
tradition. This formula, of course, strictly valid only for 
vanished and primitive days, would imply in later stages 
a dwindling of lyric and choral elements in favor of 
epic; and it would agree with facts. All Greek poetry, 
and there is no higher type, began in some kind of sing- 
ing; poetry everywhere so begins; and the sundering of 
music and words is a recognized process which would 
keep pace with the decline of purely choral verse, the 
rise of individual poets, and the increase of passive 
interest in story and idea for themselves. Improvisa- 
tion, once almost universal among peasants and rural 
folk throughout Europe, is conceded by Aristotle, in an 
empiric way, as the basis of poetry; theoretically, too, 
it is only composition in a rude, unreflective stage. The 
ease of applying communal improvisation to the ballad 
problem is obvious to any one who reads Professor 
Kittredge's comments 1 on the process. 

Doubtless, now, this ought to serve as a definition of 
ballad origins. It shows what ballads may, even must, 
have been. But it is not an adequate account of ballads 
as they lie before us, of ballads in their bulk and actual 
text, of the " Child Waters," the "Sir Patrick Spens," 
the "Twa Sisters" of our collection. The early texts, 
we say, were mainly improvised by dancers in intervals 
1 Cambridge Ed. Child's Ballads, p. xxiv. 



76 THE BALLAD 

of the choral refrain; this is a reasonable supposition, 
but so far it is only a supposition. It has been denied 
outright, and other explanations have been given. The 
texts, one could answer, are not really needed for choral 
purposes, and, allowing for the difference in time and 
place, might well have been suggested to a rustic poet by 
the refrain itself, somewhat as on higher levels of art a 
crude bit of popular verse suggested "Childe Roland to 
the Dark Tower Came," or as, by Pater's pretty imagin- 
ing, a great hymn to love sprang from the repeated 
Cras amet of a Roman festal throng. A rough but effi- 
cient criticism might set aside hundreds of stanzas in 
our ballads which could never have been improvised 
by a throng of dancers. True, these could be referred 
to the refining and ennobling process of tradition; but 
that again is a guess. Why not take the obvious way, 
giving the choral to the chorus, and the poem to the 
poet? The simple artistic refrain, from Theocritus and 
Catullus to Spenser, and the more complicated forms of 
roundel and triolet and ballade, have something to say 
to this sweeping claim that ballad texts are derived from 
purely choral and popular origins. If we are to give the 
poem itself, whether directly or indirectly, to the chorus, 
— and that is what the definition by origins really 
means, — we must find better reason for such an award 
than mere juxtaposition of refrain and text. This juxta- 
position, to be sure, creates a presumption that they 
spring in the first instance from one and the same source; 
, but such a presumption is offset by the protest of com- 



REFRAIN AND TEXT 77 

mon sense against the idea of ballads like our "Child 
Waters" deriving from the improvisation of a choral 
throng. We must face the extant, present facts. Take, 
for example, "The Maid and the Palmer," * a ballad 
known in Faroe, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, found in 
the Percy manuscript, and recollected from tradition, as 
a fragment, by Sir Walter Scott. The refrain and first 
stanza in the Percy version may follow in spite of pos- 
sible revolt on the part of readers : — 

"The maid shee went to the well to washe, 

Lillumwham, lillumwham! 
The maid shee went to the well to washe, 

What then ? What then ? 
The maid shee went to the well to washe. 
Dew ffell off her lillywhite fleshe. 

Grandam boy, grandam boy, heye! 
Leg a deny, leg a merry, mett, mer, whoope, whir! 

Drimance, larumben, grandam boy, heye ! ' ' 

Relieved of this "burden," we read with interest the text 
in its rapid two-line stanza, its dialogue, and its swift 
conclusion; if the burden were printed throughout, w r e 
should not read the ballad at all. Those, however, who 
sang this ballad, sang the burden with delight. In Scot- 
land it had another burden, a short, articulate one, a 
compromise, fused with the text. Now we are just as 
sure that the origin of this varying burden or refrain, 
purely choral in purpose, was different from the origin 
of the epic text, as we are sure that under certain con- 
ditions the refrain was the main consideration in the 

1 No. 21. 



78 THE BALLAD 

piece. It is quite possible that many a stanza of inde- 
pendent origin came to be used as refrain for a new 
ballad. There is the dilemma. Analogy, and even the 
history of ballad literature, raise, as was said, a fair 
presumption of common choral origins for refrain and 
text; the texts themselves often protest against it. We 
can come to no conclusion until we get some proof of 
choral origins for the texts themselves. 1 

If we can but lay both presumption and protest aside, 
study the ballad as a whole and in all its range, text as 
well as refrain, and fix careful attention upon its struc- 
ture in every case, we are confronted by certain facts which 
will lead to definite results, however they may seem at 
first to beget intolerable confusion. We find ballads, and 
parts of ballads, where the text is really little more than 
a progressive refrain. We find ballads which combine 
this dominant choral structure with simple and straight- 
forward but quite subordinate narrative. We find, again, 
fairly long ballads which are simple narrative through- 
out. And, lastly, there is the combination of certain 
narrative ballads into a coherent epic poem. 2 Chronology 
of the usual kind has nothing to say in this matter; the 
epic poem, later and more finished in form, is actually 
of older record than most of the ballads; and we must 

1 It should be added that the history of ballad refrains is still un- 
written and presents enormous difficulties. A theory is easily made; its 
application to facts such as are presented by the Faroe, Icelandic, and 
Scandinavian burden, often longer than the ballad stanza itself, is diffi- 
cult to a degree. 

2 The Gest of Robin Hood, no. 117. 



FROM CHORAL TO EPIC 79 

forget the tyranny of dates. This done, the confusion 
disappears. It is clear that ballad structure, like the 
structure of a language, is not stable; and it can be 
shown that the evolution of the epic out of the simpler 
dramatic form is a thing of growth easily followed back 
from stage to stage. The making of the original ballad 
is a choral, dramatic process and treats a situation; the 
traditional course of the ballad is really an epic process 
which tends more and more to treat a series of events, a 
story. 

Before the facts are produced upon which this ex- 
planation of balladry must lean, it is well to outline 
the development in general terms. What is meant by an 
" epic process"? One must not think of mere epic ex- 
pansion, such as those eoiae, or "like" poems, of Hesiod, 
said to have been expanded from the separate items in a 
catalogue of women, or of medieval narratives that may 
have been suggested by the ubi sunt formula, or of the 
possible working out of old memorial verses. Let us take 
a more familiar illustration. When an Italian peasant 
tells a comrade, or a group of comrades, about something 
which has lately befallen him, the onlooking alien can 
frequently get the "story" without understanding a 
word that is said. Action, often directly imitative, is 
constant; certain sentences recur again and again, along 
with their proper gestures; and the event itself is re- 
produced in all its phases as closely as conditions admit. 
Evidence without end shows that communities in early 
stages of culture, or in remote places, like the Faroe 



80 THE BALLAD 

Islands, where primitive conditions long survive, are 
wont to reproduce events and scenes in this same im- 
mediate and dramatic fashion; but since a group, not 
one person, is "telling the story," concerted action and 
harmonious words jjre achieved only by a consent of 
movement and of voice. Hence the fundamental fact 
of rhythm and chorus. The words, or " text," will be 
primarily repetition of a pithy, comprehensively descrip- 
tive phrase, 1 while the action, already known to all, will 
admit of variety from the start. Taken in length and 
breadth, such a "transcript" of events will be best 
called not a story but a situation, and it will long be 
limited by the exigencies of dramatic reproduction. 
Coming back now to our Italian, it is easy to think of 
him late in life recalling and recounting to his friends 
the event in question; it is easy to think of his children 
telling it again to a still later generation. But we know 
that in the personal reminiscence, and still more in the 
tale at second hand, dramatic conditions will be sensibly 
reduced, and epic details will spring up like a young 
forest about the parent tree. What led to the event, 
what complicated it and heightened it, what came after 
it, what sort of man the hero was, and what interplay 
of character and circumstance: these are details, not to 
speak of reflective elements that wait so closely upon 

1 So in songs of labor, and in the games of children which imitate 
these songs, words exactly fit the action: "thus the farmer sows his 
seed" stands for an older "thus we sow," etc. Compare the pretty 
Reapers' Song in Peele's Old Wives' Tale. 



FROM CHORAL TO EPIC 81 

reminiscence, which now will seem necessary to the teller 
and interesting to the audience. Violently descriptive 
acts, as of the immediate impression, can have no place; 
and such action as does occur will be limited to the 
climax, to the critical situations. Precisely such a parallel 
as was found in primitive literature for the Italian's 
immediate "story" is at hand in more developed litera- 
ture for his reminiscence and for his children's account 
of it. So the dramatic, choral cantilena of warriors who 
fought their battles over again in song passed into the 
chanted narrative of the early minstrel. The "we" 
of a chorus becomes the "he" or "they" of the rhap- 
sode. Gaston Paris finely remarks that earliest epic verse 
both creates and confirms the historical sense of a com- 
munity, tones down the spontaneous, passionate, mo- 
mentary elements, regulates expression, and paves the 
way for epic of a nobler sort. Traditional ballads, sung 
in the homogeneous communities of Europe, helped to 
create the social memory; and until this epic process 
worked upon lyric and dramatic material, song was 
evanescent. Ballads still bear the mark of immediate 
relation to their theme, so that no particulars of time 
or place or person need to be given. Statistics, as Child 
remarks, when too exact, are enough to throw suspicion 
upon a ballad. Le roi a fait battre tambour, — "the 
king" is enough. Nearer epic perfection, however, 
ballads must particularize with "Edward our King," 
or fasten upon the type, as in Charlemagne and Robin 
Hood. In the earlier stages of this epic process, it is in- 



82 THE BALLAD 

evitable that aristocratic personages should fill the stage, 
a fact that has made some students of the ballad hesitate 
to allow it any but aristocratic origins. But the social 
group is naturally represented by its leaders, the prince, 
the knight, the warrior. It is only in very recent develop- 
ment that the humble or common man is put into the 
foreground of story and play; and as a rule, conforming 
to the fifth and last stage of the development outlined 
by Gaston Paris, this hero is told in prose. Summing 
up the epic process, then, we may say that it gradually 
absorbs the situation into the narrative, the chorus into 
the text. 

This is surely a reasonable assumption. It is simple 
and clear. But one must make it even more reasonable; 
and simplicity is not always a good feature in explanations 
of so complex an affair. The defect of nearly all theo- 
ries of literary evolution lies in their attempt to make 
an assumed movement or process work steadily, singly, 
and untroubled by other influences. Quite the contrary 
must have been the case. It is preposterous to assert 
that at such a date and in such a place ballads were at the 
^-position, and just two centuries later, in such another 
place, had advanced to ^-position. But it is fair to 
assume a general progress, however crossed and baffled 
by other forces, from direct impression rendered in a 
"situation" to traditional reminiscence rendered in 
narrative; and if the facts of balladry can be shown 
to conform to such a general theory of progress, not, in- 
deed, in close ranks marching like an army, not even as 



FROM SITUATION TO NARRATIVE 83 

an infallible series of accretions, but as a succession of 
changes in structure revealed by actual specimens of 
the ballad itself, then the principles of science entitle 
that theory to precedence over mere cavil and criticism 
without stay of facts or warrant of research. For this 
theory of epic progress falls into line with two great 
tendencies in man's artistic career, — with that social, 
gregarious habit of reproducing events, which begins 
in the mimetic, choral situation, and on its own lines 
is developed into triumphs of the later drama, 1 as w^ell 
as with that personal, reminiscent habit which follows 
hero or hero-group through long reaches of time and 
many changes of scene for the edification of a listening 
throng. There was in primitive life a time to dance, and 
there was a time for passive curiosity, for getting informa- 
tion and reminiscence. Choral poetry in some shape, 
and also some form of epic, seem to be of equal birth and 
equally prosperous development. Each borrows some- 
thing from the other; drama must still have its compli- 
cated story, no longer the simple situation of its prime, 
while story will boast of its spectacular, dramatic fea- 
tures. Epic, as every one knows, cannot part with dia- 
logue; like Thucydides in history, the writer of novel or 
romance, even of verse-epic, gives as much as he can of 
the actual speech of his characters. So with the ballad. 
Dialogue, easiest form of improvisation, was the evident 
development from choral song, alternating with a general 
refrain ; dialogue and refrain make up many a ballad 
1 See E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, for these beginnings. 



84 THE BALLAD 

still. Repetition, of course, — for a primitive choral 
must be all repetition, — was the protoplasm; and it can 
be distinctly traced in the dialogue of older ballad ver- 
sions. Supplying the refrain, "Sheath and Knife" ends 
thus : — 

" ' There is ships o' your father's sailing on the sea, 
{The brume blooms bonnie and says it is fair,) 
That will bring as good a sheath and a knife unto thee.' 
{And we J ll never gang down to the brume onie mair.) 

" * There is ships o' my fathers sailing on the sea, 
( The brume blooms bonnie and says it is fair,) 
But sic a sheath and a knife they can never bring to me.' 
{Now we '11 never gang down to the brume onie mair.) " 

This element of dialogue in the ballads is very impor- 
tant, and deserves careful study for itself. It has its own 
hint of choral origins. Abrupt, dramatic openings, with 
a dialogue only partially explained, are characteristic; 
but the choral influences are best followed in a more 
pervasive and definite guise. At this more sweeping 
proof of our proposition we are now to look; but it may 
be said generally that the course of the popular ballad 
is from a mimetic choral situation, slowly detaching 
itself out of the festal dance, and coming into the remi- 
niscent ways of tradition in song and recital. Of that 
primitive choral ballad nothing is left but the traces of 
its course and the survival of its elements in later stages 
of evolution. In its original fluid and quite choral form, 
the ballad could no more be preserved as a poem than 
molten iron is preserved as such in the casting. Only 



DIALOGUE • 85 

after it had cooled and hardened into some consistent 
shape, in some particular mould, could it be handed 
down as a definite ballad, sung or recited from age to 
age. Naturally the reminiscent elements increased; the 
process of transfer from dramatic to epic influences 
resulted in one instance and at a very late stage in the 
"Gest of Robin Hood." But the ways of the English 
and Scottish ballad were mainly those of a survival; it 
had fallen on evil times, and shrank everywhere from the 
onrush of letters; so that most of our traditional versions 
remained in a far older stage of progress than the " Gest" 
or even than its component ballads, often, indeed, in 
close neighborhood to choral origins. — But this is theory, 
statement. How do we know it all ? What are the facts 
which prove such structural and specific €hanges along 
the traditional line? 

VI. CHORAL AND EPIC ELEMENTS 

There is a division, easy to note, between the structure 
in longer narrative ballads, like those of the Robin Hood 
cycle, the " Cheviot," and " Otterburn," and the structure 
in shorter ballads of tradition. Reversing the course, we 
can follow that epic process from chronicle to situation, 
from what seems to be a mature stage, marked by length 
of treatment, rapidity of narration, coherence of parts, 
and individual recitation, back to a stage marked by 
brevity of treatment, dominance of a situation, lack of 
narrative movement, and preponderance of choral sing- 
ing. In this process, too, another element, which is the 



86 THE BALLAD 

fundamental element in all primitive forms of poetry, 
should come and does come more and more into promi- 
nence, — verbal repetition. The maturer the stage of 
poetry, the less repetition and the more facts; reversed, 
the fewer facts, the greater amount of repetition. 1 More 
than this, the two stages in ballad structure, the earlier 
of course with some modification of original choral ele- 
ments, can be found side by side in a single traditional 
ballad. It will be profitable to study such a ballad at 
length. What has been claimed as the story of Hero 
and Leander appears in a group of ballads widely dis- 
tributed through Europe, but fullest and oldest in the 
Low German. The best version comes from the neigh- 
borhood of Paderborn, 2 and the following is a literal 
translation of it. 

"There once were two kings'-children, 
They held one another so lief ! 
They could not come together, 
The water was far too deep. 

" * Sweetheart, art thou not swimmer ? 
Sweetheart, then swim to me. 
I will set thee up two tapers 
Shall make a light for thee.' 

1 The exceptions to this rule are only apparent, such as recurring 
phrases of epic; refrain lines in artistic forms of lyric, like rondeau or 
triolet, which were really developed out of popular iteration; repetition 
in dialogue, as in early French poetry; and the recent outbreak of repe- 
tition as a kind of prose rhythm in Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio. 

2 Reifferscheid, Westfalische Volkslieder, p. 1. — For French and 
Italian forms see Le Flambeau Eteint, Crane, no. Ill, and Nigra, 
p. 68, with references to the Spanish. 



HERO AND LEANDER 87 

" A false old witch she heard them 
In her sleeping-room, ah me ! 
She went and put out the tapers : 
Sweetheart was left in the sea. 

" 'T was 1 on a Sunday morning 

When folk were gay and glad, — 
All gay but the king's daughter; 
She shut her eyes so red. 

" * O mother,' said she, ' mother, 
My eyes they trouble me; 
May I not walk a little 

By the edge of the murmuring 2 sea ? ' 

*"0 daughter,' said the mother, 
* Alone thou must not go; 
Wake up thy youngest brother, 
And he shall with thee go.' 

" * Alack, my youngest brother, 
'T is such a losel child; 
He shoote me all the seafowl 
Along the ocean tide. 

"'And e'en if he spared the tame ones 
And only shot the wild, 
Yet all the folk will tell you — 
'T was done by the king's child. 

1 Et was, matching the et wasen of the first stanza. Here is the fresh 
start. For we now come to the second part, made up of two situations; 
with the coherence of these, compare a similar case in The Lass of 
Roch Royal (Child, no. 76) and The Mother's Malison, or Clyde's Water 
(Child, no. 216). See note on p. 90, below. 

2 " Murmuring" is artistic. Swedish versions make her ask first to go 
" walk in the garden," and then " to the white sea-strand," where " white " 
matches our adjective here. The Frisian has simply "by the edge of 
the sea." 



88 THE BALLAD 

"'O mother,' said she, 'mother, 
My eyes they trouble me; 
May I not walk a little 

By the edge of the murmuring sea?' 

*" O daughter,' said the mother, 
'Alone thou must not go; 
Wake up thy youngest sister, 
And she shall with thee go.' 

" ' Alack, my youngest sister, 
'T is such a losel child, 
She plucks me all the flowers 
Along the ocean tide. 

" * And e'en if she spared the tame ones, 
And only plucked the wild, 
Yet all the folk will tell you — 
'T was done by the king's child. 

"'O mother,' said she, 'mother, 
My heart is sore in me: 
Let others go to the churches, 

I will pray by the murmuring sea.' 

"On her head, then, the king's daughter 
She set her golden crown, 
She put upon her finger 

A ring of the diamond stone. 1 

" To the church went up the mother, 
To the sea the daughter went down; 

1 It is interesting to note the different kinds of repetition. Swedish 
versions describe the heroine's dress; when she asks leave to go to the 
garden, and then to the sea, she wears "the scarlet white, likewise the 
scarlet blue;" when she goes to the shore, it is "in scarlet white, likewise 
in scarlet black." One frequently finds the demand of structure or of 
rhythm leading thus to a kind of verbal confusion. 



HERO AND LEANDER 89 

She walked so long by the water 
The fisherman she found. 

" * O fisher, dearest fisher, 

Great wage can now be won; 
Set me your nets in the water, 
And fish me the king's son.' 

" He set his nets in the water, 

The sinkers sank to the ground; 
He fished and he fished so truly, 
'T was the king's son that he found. 

" And then took the king's daughter 

From her head her golden crown, — 
'Lo there, O noble fisher, 

Thy wage I pay thee down.' 

" She drew from off her finger 

Her ring of the diamond stone, — 
*Lo there, O noble fisher, 

Thy wage I pay thee down.' 

" And in her arms she clasped him, 
The king's son, woe to tell, 
And sprang with him into the billows: 
'O father, O mother, farewell!'" 

We have in this ballad two well-marked and clearly 
divided parts, although the whole makes a perfectly 
good story. The first part is a complete, straightforward 
narrative, very brief; the second part is a kind of sup- 
plement, a protracted situation, and very long. Swedish 
versions, to be sure, give the first part in greater detail: 
the swimmer's start is described, his weariness, his con- 
fusion when the lights go out. A page of the court sees 



90 THE BALLAD 

him drown, and brings the news. Execration, in an 
"aside," disposes of the witch for time and eternity. 
But short or long, nothing of this first part, the narrative, 
is really needed for the second part, the situation, save 
the drowned lover; and any lover, provided he is dis- 
tinctly drowned, will serve. Juliet far outshines Romeo. 
Nor, again, is there so much interest in the narrative part 
as in the supplement, the situation part, which really 
consists of tw r o situations closely joined by motive, time, 
action. In many cases this arrangement, which is typical 
in most of the short English ballads, could be called by 
some such name as "the split situation," — not eupho- 
nious, to be sure, but convenient. We shall often meet 
it. 1 Going back to the Hero and Leander case, we find 
that as between narrative and situation, the main divi- 
sions of the ballad, not only is the suture evident, but the 
style and structure of the second part mark it off from 
the first part. The first part is fairly epic, telling its 
straightforward story; the second part is full of what 
may be called incremental repetition. There is nothing 
straightforward about it; the story, if that word maybe 

1 This "split situation" marks the first breach of the dramatic 
unity of time, and the entering wedge of narrative. The trail of it can 
be followed even into long and awkward chronicle ballads like Hugh 
Spencer (no. 158) and Sir Andrew Barton (no. 167); in a short ballad, 
The Great Silkie (no. 113), the situation has an effective combination 
with retrospect and prospect, the latter worthy of Heine. Ordinarily 
the "split situation" appears in such ballads as nos. 76 and 216, 
mentioned above, p. 87, note. Compare also Prince Heathen (no. 104), 
hardly a "fragment" as Child calls it, the popular Lord Lovel (no. 75), 
and many ballads of the same plan. 



LEAPING AND LINGERING 91 

used, keeps lingering, still lingering, and then leaps to a 
new part somewhat like those clocks whose hands point 
only to the fiye-minute interyals on the dial. A great 
deal has been made of this leaping, springing moyement 
of ballads, the omission of details, the ignoring of con- 
nect iye and explanatory facts, the sey en-league stride 
oyer stretches of time and place which in regular epic 
would claim pages of elaborate narratiye. Far too little, 
on the other hand, has been made of the lingering, of 
the succession of stanzas or of verses, mainly in triads, 
which are identical saye for one or two piyotal words, 1 
delaying and almost pausing on the almost pausing 
action, and marking a new phase in the grouping of 
persons and events. And practically nothing at all has 
been made of the combination of these two features as 
a formula of the situation-ballad which points unerringly 
back to choral conditions, to a dance where the crowd 
moyes to its own singing, and where the song, mainly 
repetition, got its matter from successive stages or shifts 
of what may be called a situation rather than a story. 
Literal repetition yielded, for the sake of progress, to 
this repetition with increments, deyeloping the situation; 
and incremental repetition came soon to be the close 
pattern of ballad stuff. Refrains may stay or yanish; 
in the record they cease to appeal to yoice and ear, and 

1 Troubling eyes and the wish to walk — repeated, with a slight 
change in the answers from "brother" to "sister," in two stanzas — 
shift in the third increment of the triad to sore heart and the need to 
pray. The second of the two situations condenses the repetition. 



92 THE BALLAD 

seem a waste of energy; but incremental repetition 
can wane only by the slow process of "making over," 
by excision and connection, from one version to an- 
other. Hence its great significance. It supplies a visible 
link between oldest choral repetition and actual text; 
and in the ballad just quoted it furnishes, now by its 
presence and now by its absence, a capital illustration 
of the evolution of epic out of choral conditions. 

For it is beyond doubt that the situation in ballads 
is older, more characteristic, and more essential, than the 
unmixed, smooth-flowing narrative. As was pointed out 
in the preceding section, all ballads of tradition carry with 
them the marks of two great interests that have ever 
been active on the aesthetic side of man's life. One is 
the natural desire of everybody to hear a good story; and 
the other that equally natural desire of the normal man to 
gratify his social and emotional propensities by singing, 
dancing, and enacting, along with his fellows, a familiar or 
exciting situation. The adjustment of these two claims 
is neither simple combination, as in our "Hero and 
Leander," nor that cheerful but clumsy fusion found 
in the Shetland traditional ballad of "King Orfeo." * It 
is a matter of evolution; choral and dramatic elements 
ruled in earliest stages, while epic prevails at the end. 
In the ballad now under consideration, the epic preface 
is a summary, an accretion, 2 a later thought, and there- 
fore can easily fall away. It does fall away. Many 

1 No. 19. 

2 See note on Two Brothers, below, p. 123. 



REPETITION 93 

versions drop it altogether, or rather, as Reifferscheid 

concedes, never had it to drop. Abrahamson, who heard 

this ballad sung by a housemaid in Denmark about the 

year 1750, says that she always began with the daughter's 

request, with abrupt dialogue of the situation, and with 

no preliminary narrative. In like manner the Lettish 

version begins : — 

"Ah, how sore my head is aching, 
Ah, my head is aching sore; — 
Let me, mother, darling mother, 
Let me wander by the shore/' 

Such, too, is the opening of many other versions. 

This addition of epic details to verse which in the first 
instance springs from a choral and ceremonial source, is 
familiar upon other fields. So common is repetition in all 
religious rites, that its vogue in poetry is now and then 
ascribed to a liturgical source rather than to the obvious 
communal and festal influence. It is the choral, public, 
communal origin of all liturgies that explains their repe- 
tition; and their epic part must be explained along with 
the epic of ballads. Charms or incantations have a brief 
narrative introduction, a kind of Olympian credential, 
often detachable from the charm itself; but in such a 
ritual as the hymn of the Arval Brothers in Rome, all is 
choral and fairly resonant with the steps of the dance. 
There can be no question that this is the original form; 
why should narrative come into the ancient rite ? It is 
worth noting, too, that the inscription which preserves 
this hymn, in its invocation to Mars, gives most of the 
verses three times in laborious repetition; iteration must 



94 THE BALLAD 

have been a serious matter when so much of it had to 
be cut in stone. All poetry which begins in these public 
rites, in funeral and marriage and whatever festal occa- 
sion, has an insistent note of repetition, at first literal 
and then incremental. As one recedes from choral con- 
ditions, direct reference to the dance, as in the Arval 
Hymn — 

" Leap o'er the threshold ! Halt ! Now beat the ground ! " — 

is apt to fall away, and narrative comes in to explain 
and justify the rite itself. Precisely so with old ritual and 
what passes as its myth, with magic ceremonies, mainly 
a mimetic dance, and the legend or legends which explain 
the rite in epic fashion and give a reason for the faith 
that is in it. The primacy of ritual is sustained by a 
mass of ethnological evidence. Often several legends are 
found to explain the same ceremony; and trustworthy 
authorities regard the former as derived from the latter. 1 
Beatty's study of the St. George Plays in England makes 
it almost certain that the underlying and original func- 
tion was a magic, dramatic ritual, full of dance, song, 
and mimetic action, to symbolize the awakening of the 
powers of nature. With Christianity the legend, such as 
it was, needed a new form; and the story of St. George 
was adapted to the old play, changing so far to fit the 
original rite as to make the hero first a victim to hostile 
powers and then the subject of a revival or resurrection. 
Frazer, in his "Golden Bough," has brought abundant 
evidence for our general thesis. A myth is never the 
1 See Beatty, work quoted, pp. 313, 323. And see above, p. 45. 



RITUAL BEFORE MYTH 95 

basis of ceremony, — epic, in other words, never gave 
birth in the first instance to drama. The dramatic fact 
may be developed by the epic process into narrative of 
whatever kind; and myth is a projection of early rites. 
Such was also the case with ritual of a later and more 
domestic sort. The old Corsican funeral songs were 
called not only lamenti, but ballati, because of the dance 
that modern generations know no more. "Make wide 
the circle," ran an ancient lament, "and dance the cara- 
colu; for this sorrow is very sore." The dance vanished, 
but the vocero remained; and it long held the incre- 
mental repetition of choral grief. Later rose the epic 
or historic elegy, the panegyric. Traces faint enough but 
sure of this custom can be found in our own ballads. A 
kind of vocero, with haunting refrain and the usual epic, 
explanatory stanzas, is to be found in "Bonny James 
Campbell;" 1 while incremental repetition marks the 
choral part of "The Bonny Earl of Murray," 2 in no 
sense a primitive or even unsophisticated ballad, but in- 
teresting for the detachment of narrative from situation 
and for the echo of an old lament. 

" Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands, 
Oh where hae ye been ? 
They have slain the Earl of Murray 
And they layd him on the green. 

" * Now wae be to thee, Huntly ! 
And wherefore did you sae ? 

1 Child, no. 210. The wife's lament, though different in two versions, 
is characteristic of the real vocero. 

2 No. 181. 



96 THE BALLAD 

I bade you bring him wf you, 
But forbade you him to slay.' * 

" He was a braw gallant, 
And he rid at the ring ; 
And the bonny Earl of Murray, 
Oh he might have been a king! 

" He was a braw gallant, 
And he playd at the ba'; 
And the bonny Earl of Murray 
Was the flower amang them a\ 

"He was a braw gallant, 

And he playd at the glove; 

And the bonny Earl of Murray, 

Oh he was the queen's love. 

" Oh lang will his lady 

Look o'er the Castle Down, 
Ere she see the Earl of Murray 

Come sounding through the town." 3 

We shall also see how the riddle, at first mere question 
and answer in the circle of dancing folk, is taken out of its 
first setting and embodied in a little epic or tale. One does 
not need, however, to rely on these analogies to show that 
the epic or narrative part of ballads is detachable from 

1 This dramatic turn in the narrative is supposed to be spoken by the 
king to Huntly, whose followers killed the Earl in February, 1592. 

2 The smoothness and pathos of the ballad, and the source of it in 
Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, give it a sophisticated if elegant note, 
as compared with the version B (from recitation), with its homely vocero 
touch at the end. Nevertheless, the triad and the incremental repetition 
are of the true traditional type, and the groundwork of the ballad is both 
popular and of genuine, if remote, choral origin. 



SURVIVALS OF THE DANCE 97 

the older situation, and so to prove that the ballad of 
situation is offspring of the festal dance. The latter pro- 
cess stands out clearly for itself. In the long reaches of 
time, to be sure, very few ballads that were actually com- 
posed at the dance have come down to us. Two considera- 
tions should always be borne in mind. Such a ballad, 
apart from its occasion, would have little of what we call 
literary merit, and would not commend itself for written 
record; and where it did find record, the tendency to 
suppress repetitions would be almost irresistible. The 
only real preservative of this choral repetition is when it 
passes into the actual structure of the ballad and so for a 
long time defies the epic impulses of smoothness and pro- 
portion. Nevertheless, traces of actual choral repetition 
can be found. Not only is it certain that ballads were 
made in the festal throng; some survive that were used 
for the dance, and these afford in their structure clear 
evidence of actual dramatic and ehoral origin. The 
Ditmarsh folk of Holstein, whose old dances have been 
carefully described, 1 had a certain springeltanz which, 
despite a corrupted and abbreviated text, shows incre- 
mental repetition of the type just noted, and a situation 

1 Neocorus, Chronik, ed. Dahlmann, i, 177, who says the people have 
fitted nearly all their songs to the dance "in order to remember them 
better" and keep them current, gives this interesting account. The 
"foresinger" plays a great part, with choral answer and refrain; but 
there are whole ballads where all the persons sing as they dance. This 
is precisely the case with old French dances; but while the latter are all 
"aristocratic" to the point of making their modern investigators doubt 
the existence of "popular" customs, here are genuine communal dances 
and songs of the "folk." See above, p. 24. 



98 THE BALLAD 

akin to the first situation of the second part of the Hero 
and Leander ballad. It is the formula of "asking per- 
mission " to go somewhere or to do something, 1 — in this 
case, to join the festal dance itself. 

" ' The summer days are coming, 
The pleasant summer tide, 
And lasses and lads are dancing 
In the dale,' — so spake the wife. 

" * Dear mother, little mother, 

To the evening dance I'd go, 
Where I hear the gay drums beating, 
Where I hear the pipers blow.' 

" ' O nay, my daughter, never that, 

To sleep thou'lt go, thou'lt go. . . .' 



" * O mother mine, that makes me woe, 
That makes me woebegone; 
And come I not to the evening dance, 
To death I would be done.' 

" ' Nay, nay, O nay, my daughter, 
Alone thou shalt not go; 

1 Getting permission to go and visit a dangerous gallant or other 
fascinating person is found in the continental versions of the Lady 
Isabel group; see Child, i, 26, and "relative-climax," below, p. 102. 
Compare also for English ballads the incremental repetition of this 
formula in The Cruel Brother (no. 11) and even in the less popu- 
lar class like Katharine J affray (no. 221). It is effectively used in tragic 
ballads represented by the German Christinchen ging in'n Garten, 
Reifferscheid, no. 2, and in the whole class of which The Maid Freed 
from the Gallows (Child, no. 95) is type. 



HOLSTEIN SPRINGELTANZ 99 

But waken up thy brother 
And let him with thee go.' 

" * My brother is young, is but a child, 
And him I'll never wake; 
I'd rather rouse another man 
With whom I'm fain to speak.' " 

Further escort was doubtless suggested and declined ; but 
the fact remains that here, in an actual dancing ballad, 
however imperfectly recorded, is the situation, and prac- 
tically nothing more. The mother prophesies evil, but 
submits, — reminding one of the mother in Her Nithart's 
verses; * and the daughter merely goes to the dance, 
meets a knight, and is kissed and claimed as partner by 
him. That is all this dance-ballad needed. In a Danish 
version, 2 however, which has lost its connection with the 
actual dance and come to serve other interests in the 
course of tradition, narrative and tragedy triumph. It is 
the king who meets fair Signelille; the queen hears, then 
sees her; and promptly poisons her with a cup of wine. 
A story, from whatever source, has first attached itself to 

1 Deutsche Liederdichter des 12-14 Jhdts., 3d ed., p. 104. Note the 
daughter's wish: — 

" Mother, let me wend 
Afield with the merry band, 
And let me dance the ring ! 
'T is long since I have heard the girls 
New ditties sing." 

That is, they are singing new songs at the dance, after the medieval 
fashion. 

2 Grundtvig, iii, 165. There is a hint of this old "choosing partners" 
motive at the end of the Revesby Sword Play. 

lofc 



100 THE BALLAD 

this simple situation, and then has dominated it. Such a 
development of epic out of dramatic and choral interests 
is natural enough, and can often explain differences 
between related versions of a given ballad. Thus " The 
Bonny Lass of Anglesey," 1 in its two Scottish versions, is 
mainly narrative and has only traces of incremental repe- 
tition ; the lass tires out a number of dancers in a match 
made by the king, and wins her "fifteen ploughs," her 
mill, and for husband the fairest knight in the court. In 
the corresponding Danish ballad, 2 however, the main 
situation is the dance itself, where a king's son offers one 
gift after the other, only to be refused, until he pledges 
honor and troth. Then follows the story, still, to be sure, 
with incremental repetition and the refrain of a dancing 
ballad, but with distinctly epic interest and in this case 
a very romantic conclusion. 3 Now the actual stories differ 
considerably in what seem to be varying versions under 
different names; while the dance, as Grundtvig says, 
may be regarded as the characteristic and stable feature, 
— one may add, the original feature. No better case of 
incremental repetition, along with refrain, 4 as sole mate- 
rial of the ballad, could be found than in this first half, 
which echoes the very steps and motions of the dance, — 

" * Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me ! 
A silken sark I will give to thee.' 

1 Child, no. 220. 

2 Liden Kirstins Dans, Grundtvig, v, 119 f. 

3 Compare the romantic conclusion of TcErningspillet, below, p. 118. 

4 Omitted in the verses quoted here. 



DANCE AND DIALOGUE 101 

" * A silken sark I can get me here, 

But I'll not dance with the Prince this year.' 

" * Christine,* Christine, tread a measure for me, 
Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee.' 

" ' Silver-clasped shoes I can get,' " etc. 

The same refusal, in the same words; and next a clasp 
of gold, half of a gold ring, a pair of silver-hilted knives, 
each with the refusal in answer, — and then " honor and 
troth." Knowing how common is the gift of improvisation 
with unspoiled rural folk everywhere, one sees how easily 
this sort of dialogue could spring up at the dance, stayed 
upon a lively refrain, and ending with the end of the par- 
ticular situation. The next departure is epic and tradi- 
tional, — a story to explain or comment on the situation. 
Such is the case in our Danish ballad. In the Scottish 
version situation and story are fused to the loss of nearly 
all the choral features; but very different is the case with 
a ballad of no aesthetic value, indeed, but of the highest 
importance for the significance of its dramatic situation 
and its primitive form of structure, — " The Maid Freed 
from the Gallows." * Here one can really think himself 
with the earliest ballad-makers. The song is formed by 
incremental repetition alone; it has no epic preface, no 
narrative, but such as can be guessed from the situation; 
it is dramatic from beginning to end. It has no refrain, 

1 Child, no. 95. Professor Kittredge, in the one-volume ed., p. xxv, 
uses an American version of this ballad to show how easily mere choral 
singing of a crowd, with slightest touch of invention, could improvise a 
ballad. 



102 THE BALLAD 

and needs none; the whole piece might be called an 
incremental refrain in dialogue. It deals with a situation, 
common to many ballads of Europe, which brings out 
the "climax of relatives; " ! and it is of course derived, in 
the length and breadth of its vogue, from oral tradition. 

" ' O good Lord Judge, and sweet Lord Judge, 
Peace for a little while ! 
Methinks I see my own father 
Come riding by the stile. 

" * Oh father, oh father, a little of your gold, 
And likewise of your fee ! 
To keep my body from yonder grave 
And my neck from the gallows-tree.' 

" * None of my gold now shall you have, 
Nor likewise of my fee; 
For I am come to see you hang'd, 
And hanged you shall be.' 

" ■ O good Lord Judge, and sweet Lord Judge, 
Peace for a little while ! 
Methinks I see my own mother 
Come riding by the stile. 

" * O mother, O mother, a little of your gold, 
And likewise of your fee, 
To keep my body from yonder grave, 
And my neck from the gallows tree.' 

" ' None of my gold now shall you have, 
Nor likewise of my fee; 
For I am come to see you hang'd, 
And hanged you shall be.'" 

1 See below, pp. 120 ff . 



•MAID FREED FROM GALLOWS 103 

Two more triads deal precisely in the same way with 
sister and brother; it is clear that this line could stretch 
farther than the eight kings in "Macbeth," and that no 
faintest spark of "invention" is needed for such a song 
once the first stanzas are achieved. Only its definite situa- 
tion, its grouping of persons, its distinct if monotonous 
narrative progress, and the climax, presently to be 
quoted, sunder it from the great mass of cumulative 
songs, some of which serve the same purpose of a festal 
dance. 1 But when the singer chose, or the supply of rela- 
tives ceased, this little dramatic ballad of a situation 
found its end to general satisfaction, — as follows: — 

" 'O good Lord Judge, and sweet Lord Judge, 
Peace for a little while ! 
Methinks I see my own true love 
Come riding by the stile. 

" c O true love, O true love, a little of your gold, 
And likewise of your fee, 

1 These cumulative songs are conceded generally to the popular muse. 
Most of them are mere repetition save for a single increment to the 
stanza. See Beginnings of Poetry, pp. 201 ff. As for ballads, version K 
of Lamkin (Child, no. 93, ii, 333 f .) can be continued as long as female 
names will last. No. 274, Our Goodman, is a jocular cumulative ballad; 
it is highly interesting to note (Child, v, 90) that "the lace-makers of 
Vorey are wont to recite or sing [the counterpart of] this ballad winter 
evenings as a little drama." So, too, in Lorraine and in Provence. The 
old dancing-song of the East Frisians is an extremely interesting case of 
cumulative repetition (cock, ox, cat, dog, dove) used in figures of the 
dance, as distinguished from the incremental repetition of this M aid 
Freed from the Gallows. The latter is more dramatic, and is farther 
removed from the memory-tests of cumulative verse. — See Buske di 
Remmer in Bohme, Liederbuch, pp. 378 ff . 



104 THE BALLAD 

To save my body from yonder grave 
And my neck from the gallows tree.' 

" 'Some of my gold now shall you have, 
And likewise of my fee; 
For I am come to see you sav'd 
And saved you shall be.' " 1 

This ballad of " The Maid Freed from the Gallows," 
in its European variants, is extraordinarily widespread 
and popular; 2 in remote Finland there are fifty versions 
of it. Now and then a narrative has been prefixed to 
explain the situation, as in the long Sicilian version; but 
the core of the thing is the situation itself. The setting 
varies at will. A girl is drowning, or is to be carried off 
by pirates; she appeals vainly to father, brother, sister, 
mother, but all refuse to save her, to ransom her, to sell a 
red coat, a house, a castle, what not; and they tell the 
sailors to "let her drown," until finally the lover is willing 
to sell himself as slave to the oar and so redeem his sweet- 
heart. Whatever the details, incremental structure, com- 
bined with the climax of relatives, is the essential and 

1 This happy ending commended itself in two versions of Mary 
Hamilton (no. 173), turning the edge of tragedy. In X, however, the 
true-love refuses, a mere interlude, and the ballad has its usual end. 
An inversion of this same situation, with even clearer and quite persistent 
reference to choral conditions, is La Ballerina, an Italian ballad, where 
a woman will not stop dancing "for the reported death of father, mother, 
brother, sister, husband, but when told that her boy is dead, asks the 
players to cease." — Child, v, 231. 

2 See Child, hi, 516; v, 90, 231; Reifferscheid, notes to Schip- 
mann, pp. 138 ft'.; and the discussion by Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, 
pp. 235 f . 



THE PARENT DANCE 105 

invariable element; choral origins are made certain by 
internal evidence, by traditional connection with the 
dance, and by the important test of survival. For this 
ballad in at least one of its English versions, in a Faroe 
version, and in sundered groups like the Danish and the 
Magyar, is still used as an actual game or dance, now for 
children and now for older folk. 1 

Here is the real connecting link between ballads as they 
appear in our collections and that choral, communal 
origin towards which so many probabilities have pointed. 
The process cannot be reversed. To make the dance or 
game a terminal and accidental application of verse 
written for epic purposes is to ignore obvious facts. Bal- 
lads named from the dance are so named by origins and 
not by destination. In late stages of development, to be 
sure, a popular play, a folk drama, as it is called, could be 
founded on a popular ballad, as in the fragment, printed 
by Professor Child from a manuscript older than 1475, 
and evidently based on the ballad of " Robin Hood and 
Guy of Gisborne." But this "dramatic piece" is at the 
end of a long process of evolution in folk plays and, like 
the ballad itself, has few if any choral elements left. 2 

1 In the Faroe version, still used for the dance, as many relatives can 
be interposed before the lover-climax as the players please. It is really 
a game, with two parties: the girl and her friends, and the pirates. The 
dance ends when, after the refusal of all the friends and relatives to 
intervene, — that is, to dance with her, — the girl is "rescued" by her 
betrothed, and the two dance together a final figure. — See the ballad in 
Hammershaimb, Fcer0sk Anthologi, i, 268 f . 

2 The Robin Hood plays " are subsequent to the development of 
religious drama," and "are of the nature of interludes, and were doubt- 



106 THE BALLAD 

Robin Hood plays were presented in London and other 
cities, and even before the court of Henry VIII; and it is 
probable, as Chambers points out, that this Robin was 
at first only the Robin of French pastourelles, and later 
identified with the popular ballad hero. The primitive 
play, festival, rite, are never derived from any stage of 
the ballad, legend, myth; these, it is generally conceded, 
spring in the first instance from the dramatic and com- 
munal presentation. Apart from possible liturgical 
sources for certain phases of the ballad, we may be con- 
tent with its manifest origins in the dance. Dances, as 
overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological, can 
prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric, 
and epic impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later 
narrative ballads mainly as incremental repetition. Sepa- 
ration of its elements, and evolution to higher forms, 
made the dance an independent art, with song, and then 
music, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself 
passed to lyric triumphs quite apart from choral voice 
and choral act; epic went its artistic way with nothing 
but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and the story 
instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situa- 
tion, the action, even the chorus and the dance, but sub- 
mitted them to the shaping and informing power of 
individual genius. Only in these earliest and rudest 
ballads of the actual choral dance, and in their late sur- 

less written, like the plays of Adan de la Hale, by some clerk or minstrel. 
. . . They are, therefore, in a less degree folk-drama than sword-dances 
and the like." — E. K. Chambers, The Mediceval Stage, i, 178. 



THE PARENT DANCE 107 

vival as children's games, are the original elements visible 
in what is approximately the original combination. 
European ballads of the dance, in their dramatic form, 
lingered with remote homogeneous communities like that 
of the Faroes, or among the happy folk of Holstein be- 
fore the innovations came which Neocorus so feelingly 
deplores ; even in the record these ballads have been sub- 
mitted to the merest touch of epic explanation. The 
Faroe ballad of relatives, for example, took its situation 
directly from life; rovers who carried off girls are still 
held in vivid remembrance on the islands; and it is with 
a shudder as of real peril that the piece is still enacted 
and sung. Visitors of long ago, and visitors of yesterday, 
tell of the force with which the Faroe folk realize this 
simple situation, their dramatic fervor and their intense 
interest in their parts. To feel the ballad as one dances it 
is the primary stage in its development, 1 not the final lapse 
into decay; such customs bring one close to the real situa- 
tion, the real event. If Chambers is right, the homely but 
affecting ballad of "Andrew Lammie" 2 "used in former 
times to be presented in a dramatic shape at rustic meet- 

1 That the cante-fable, a late and artistic, if often successful affair 
(such as Aucassin and Nicolette), cannot be the protoplasm common to 
folk tale and ballad, as Mr. Joseph Jacobs suggested, is evident. The 
ballad in its beginnings is contemporary, choral, rhythmic; the tale is 
reminiscent prose. Combination of verse and prose is always late, 
always artificial or artistic, and is impossible for choral conditions. See 
Beginnings of Poetry, pp. 71 i., and such hints as Child gives, i, 46, 
and elsewhere. 

2 Child, no. 233. Compare, too, the dramatic singing of the Twa 
Brothers at the St. George play: see below, p. 123. 



108 THE BALLAD 

ings in Aberdeenshire; " and it is probable that a like tale 
could be told of many another ballad now known in none 
but its reminiscent and traditional versions. 

Similar considerations must prevail in view of the sur- 
vival of a primitive stage of ballads in the games of chil- 
dren. Survivals of this sort are really a rescue and not a 
funeral rite. They revive the past of communal festivity 
as in other forms they revive the past of a ritual, an old 
ceremonial dance. For whatever reason, too, these very 
games are now passing away in their turn; but such as 
they are, these diversions of boys and girls were once the 
aesthetic expression of a whole adult community quite as 
homogeneous in its unlettered life as the crowd of chil- 
dren at play is homogeneous in terms of inexperience 
and youth. In a survival we are always looking at things 
through a reversed spy-glass; the primitive folk looked 
through the right end, and what this mere game repre- 
sents was once poetry, music, drama, bringing the fate 
and mystery of life into larger outline and more majestic 
groupings. It is not romantic nonsense to say that the 
choral effect, even now, of a few simple words sung many 
times over by many voices, has an aesthetic appeal quite 
independent of verbal associations. In poetry we mod- 
erns — modern in the sense that an Athenian at his 
Euripidean tragedy was modern — demand the "lyric 
cry;" under the conditions which ruled when earliest 
ballads were made, men needed the choral cry. Distinct 
from both is the reminiscent, less exciting and more satis- 
fying, quite objective story of the epic, — the middle way, 



THE EPIC PROCESS 109 

neither " cathartic " like the drama nor a relief of personal 
emotion like the lyric. Ballads tended from dramatic 
beginnings into this middle way. 1 The ballads that we 
have are not, in bulk, of the primitive dramatic type, 
where all that directly interested the community fell into 
mimetic action with song. Tradition had doubtless 
selected and preserved some of the best ballads of situa- 
tion; a few, purely dramatic, had survived with the 
dance; but an impulse not purely dramatic and choral 
had come into play. Set in words and song, the situation 
could shift for itself; and it was easy to improvise a few 
verses which developed the situation by description 
instead of by action, and thus to answer demands of an 
epic interest. 

It is not hard to imagine this epic interest in a very 
humble and initial phase. The too familiar sight of a 
Faroe girl carried off by those "Frisian pirates," and 
appealing in turn to her relatives, passed directly into 
choral expression bounded by the situation itself. Strik- 
ing, full of poignant interest, the simple iterated verses 
were soon sung for their own sake, and at once responded 
to an external demand for more facts. 2 A mother, we 
will say, sings them to her children, in reminiscent mood; 

1 Popular tales had taken this route from the start; and it may be 
presumed that, different from ballads, they had always been concerned 
with things remote in time or in space. The ballad was immediate. 

2 "The Frisians bent to their oars," so a slight narrative puts it; the 
girl wept, and cried in the refrain, "Let me not pine in Frisia." Then 
the dramatic situation begins, with wonderfully uniform incremental 
repetition throughout, as detailed above. 



110 THE BALLAD 

the situation is no longer present, the persons no longer 
in evidence; and the children wish to know who the girl 
was and how she came to her plight. Or the story is still 
sung in a group, but as reminiscence; meeting the external 
desire for more details, improvisation of new stanzas, still 
holding fast to the old formula, develops, as poetic ' ' inven- 
tion," a higher type of verse. So the ballad, if noteworthy, 
might go its way from year to year. It is clear that no- 
thing in this ballad of the Frisian pirates needed to be 
borrowed or imported; as we learned, the case was too 
familiar, and is said still to cause a traditional shiver of 
fear among the Faroe folk. "To be take in Fryse," or to 
Frisia,was no word of jest, as with Chaucer. Here, in any 
case, was material enough to fill and form the original 
ballad mould, to create the poetic species. That all man- 
ner of interesting stories, found, imported, and perhaps 
even invented, could subsequently be run into this mould 
is natural as a process and plain enough as a fact. But 
the species itself, the ballad as a poetic form, was subject 
to the usual laws of growth and change. Sung as a choral 
favorite, such a piece as the "Frisian Pirates" would not 
only improve in its traditional course, but, according to 
the conditions of its vogue, would fall into one of two great 
classes. It might remain as a ballad of situation, short, 
dramatic, choral. It might also go the epic way, find 
rather an audience than a throng of active, singing folk, 
lose its refrain, attract other details, motives, parts of 
story, grow in length and breadth, vary in good versions 
and bad versions, and come finally upon the record, now 



THE SITUATION BALLAD 111 

as a sterling traditional narrative, or even chronicle, and 
again as popular broadside printed by the cheap press and 
sold in the stalls. Let us look for a while at the first class. 
Here the situation retains its sovereignty, and keeps the 
ballad brief, abrupt, springing and pausing, full of incre- 
mental repetition, and mainly in dialogue form. Pages of 
description and comment cannot take the place of the 
ballad itself; and there is no better example of this old 
type than " Babylon," * recovered from Scottish tradition. 
It is neither so near its choral origins as to lose, like " The 
Maid Freed from the Gallows," all epic body and nearly 
all sesthetic appeal, nor so far from those origins as to 
have become a mere recitation of events. The refrain 
should be read aloud through the entire piece; singing 
would be better; and the incremental repetitions, mark- 
ing out the vital and specific ballad from its epic intro- 
duction and end, should be felt, as far as possible, to 
be mainspring, and not dead weight, in the poetic 
mechanism. 

" There were three ladies lived in a bower, 
Eh vow bonnie, 
And they went out to pull a flower 
On the bonnie banks o" Fordie. 

" They hadna pu'ed a flower but ane, 
When up started to them a banisht man. 

"He's ta'en the first sister by the hand, 
And he's turned her round and made her stand. 

1 Child, no. 14. 



112 THE BALLAD 

" 'It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife, 
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? ' 

" 'It's I'll not be a rank robber's wife, 
But I '11 rather die by your wee pen-knife/ 

" He 's killed this may, and he 's laid her by, 
For to bear the red rose company. 

"He's taken the second ane by the hand, 
And he's turned her round, and made her stand. 

"'It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife, 
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?' 

" 'I'll not be a rank robber's wife, 

But I '11 rather die by your wee pen-knife.' 

" He 's killed this may, and he 's laid her by, 
For to bear the red rose company. 

" He 's taken the youngest ane by the hand, 
And he's turned her round, and made her stand. 

"Says, 'Will ye be a rank robber's wife, 
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife ? ' 

" 'I '11 not be a rank robber's wife, 
Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife. 

" ' For I hae a brother in this wood, 
And gin ye kill me, it 's he '11 kill thee.' 

"'What's thy brother's name? Come tell to me.' 
'My brother's name is Baby Lon.' 

" 'O sister, sister, what have I done ! 
O have I done this ill to thee ! 



BABYLON 113 

" * O since I ' ve done this evil deed, 
Good sail never be seen o' * me.' 

" He 's taken out his wee pen-knife, 
And he's twyned 2 himsel o' his ain sweet life." 

With the parallels and the relations of "Babylon" we are 
not now concerned. 3 It may belong to a group of ballads 
which all derive from the narrative of an obvious compli- 
cation; it might spring, like the "Frisian Pirates," from 
fact. The motive of it has been used powerfully but repul- 
sively by Maupassant in one of the stories of his "Main 
Gauche." We deal now with the specific ballad form. 
That the situation is fairly explosive in its tragic out- 
come must not blind us to the fact that it is a situation. 
Who the three ladies were, why the brother was banished, 
all the essentials of a narrative, in short, are wanting. 
Maupassant in his kind of art, the Icelandic saga in its 
kind of art, would have worked all this out. The longer, 
romantic ballad itself would have come to terms, however 
briefly and awkwardly, with persons, place, time. Here 

1 " By." — The rimes, and perhaps the verses themselves, are quite 
disordered here. 

2 "Deprived," "sundered." 

3 Besides the Scandinavian versions named by Child, i, 170 ff., see 
Axel Olrik, Danske Ridderviser, i, 115 f., and "Torkels D0tur" in Ham- 
mershaimb, i, 45 f . The incremental repetition in the latter is constant 
and typical; for example, "they sleep till the sun shines on their bed: 
they sleep till the sun shines on their bedstead," — a stanza for each 
statement. In the stable, again, — 

" She looses one steed, she looses two. 
The best she places the saddle on." 

The refrain, too, belongs to the actual dance. 



114 THE BALLAD 

no persons are described; as merely "a banished man," 
the hero's name is indifferent; the place is a fortuitous 
and meaningless part of the refrain; the time is vague. 
The simple force of this "Babylon," the effective char- 
acter of its lingering repetition followed by the crash of 
revelation, must not make us forget that here is not even 
the art of narrative. Here Lessing's famous distinction 
breaks down. Poetic as it is, this ballad presents no story, 
no epic nucleus; but its art, like the art of painting, of 
sculpture, lies in the moment and in the moment's scope. 
The figures must all be before us at once, a situation 
inevitable under conditions of the dance; and they must 
all tell their tale in a single action. Indeed, with the dance 
quite ignored, forgotten, the ballad and its staying, hem- 
ming refrain still give the effect of collocation in space 
rather than of succession in time. If normal dramatic 
time be put by the old rule at four and twenty hours, the 
normal time of the situation ballad ought not to exceed 
twenty-four minutes. To accent this impression one has 
only to contrast with" Babylon " a purely narrative ballad 
of the best type, say "Robin Hood and the Monk," or 
"Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne." Here are long 
stories. Personality and character are described. ( Robin 
is handsome, blond, has a "milk-white side;" Ke is a 
muscular Christian, indeed, for while an inch of his body, 
so the Gest assures us, is worth an ordinary whole man, 
he is gentle, pious, will harm no woman, worships the 
Virgin Mary with a kind of passion, risks his life to hear 
Mass. He is the poor man's friend. Even particular habits 



SITUATION AND NARRATIVE 115 

of his are described. Yet, just as "Babylon" is at some 
remove from actual choral conditions, — for one must 
not stretch the hint of a dance in that taking of the sisters' 
hands and turning them round, — so the Robin Hood 
ballads, while far gone in epic, still keep their distance 
from the narrative of lettered art. What they have accom- 
plished for epic purposes by changes in structure, and 
that is the point now in view, lies mainly in the reduction 
of the element of incremental repetition, that is, by the 
removal of what seemed a needless obstruction, as well 
as by the filling of those gaps and omissions which critics 
persist in explaining by the psychology of authorship and 
which are so clearly due to oldest dramatic form. The 
filling up, indeed, is more easily accomplished than the 
cutting out; you turn any drama into a novel by liberal 
supplies of "Hamlet smiled sadly, and remarked," or 
" Sobbing convulsively, Ophelia handed him the letters; 
then, with supreme effort of self-control, . . ." For tran- 
sition from situation to story, the rhapsode had his own 
devices. Medieval reciters used a change of voice, or other 
trick, to denote the various persons in the poem. 1 So, too, 
by actual word and phrase, by an explanatory stanza or 
line, the shift of persons and scenes can be indicated, 
as in one of the homely but pathetic English ballads: — 

" Now we '11 leave talking of Christy Grahame 
And talk of him again belive; 
But we will talk of bonny Bewick 
Where he was teaching his scholars five." 

1 So with Greek rhapsodes. See Creizenach, Geschichie des neueren 
Dramas, i, 32, with references to Vinesauf's Poetria. 



116 THE BALLAD 

Other devices are familiar enough, and will be considered 
in the proper place; but even here, 1 with gaps well filled, 
the excisions are not so noticeable, and the tendency is 
still to situation, dialogue, and a touch of incremental 
repetition to mark the important moment. Repetitions 
are not yet felt, in Cowper's phrase, "to make attention 
lame." In point of fact, even the epic process at its 
farthest point in ballads, and with all its desire to push 
a narrative or cover a gap, is less potent to crowd out 
choral memories than the lyric, emotional and reflective 
impulse. This lyric impulse really creates a third class of 
ballads, just halting and trembling on the border of pure 
song. Here belong ' ' Barbara Allan " and ' ' Lady Alice ; " 2 
while the pretty sentiment, the long-range sympathy, of 
"Bessy Bell and Mary Gray" 3 have converted it in 
England "into a nursery rhyme." "Ballad or song" is 
Professor Child's account of it. These ballads of lyric 
tendency have repetition, but not of the incremental and 
dramatic kind. 4 They need not be regarded in the present 

1 Bewick and Grahame, Child, no. 211, is a stall-copy, a corrupted 
but not utterly spoiled version of a noble old ballad. Long as it is, it 
is really a ballad of two situations, and in the first of these the incre- 
mental repetition is very effective. See below, p. 126. 

2 Child, nos. 84, 85. 

3 Ibid. no. 201. 

4 It occurs, however, as if "dancing for joy," in the pretty fifteenth- 
century carol of Christ and his Mother : — 

" He came al so still 

There his mother was, 
As dew in April 
That falleth on the grass. 

" He came al so still 

To his mother's bower, 



THE VITAL STRUCTURE 117 

case, which is concerned with incremental repetition as the 
touchstone and test of original ballad structure, promi- 
nent in the ballads of situation, and dwindling as narrative 
gets the upper hand. 

VII. INCREMENTAL REPETITION AS FINAL PROOF OF 
POPULAR ORIGIN 

Incremental repetition made up the whole frame of 
" The Maid Freed from the Gallows. " simply because such 
ballads were still part and parcel of the dance. 1 Disen- 
gaged from the dance, ballads of situation like " Babylon," 
"Lord Randal," " The Twa Brothers," held their ground 
stoutly and kept narrative at arm's length. This leaping 
and lingering, with the group, so to speak, fixed, and the 
parts of it shifting about, created its own aesthetic appeal; 
and even the somewhat mechanical system of triads came 
to be regarded as true ballad progress. Except in the 
chronicle ballad, which felt that grim work was cut out 
for it, and therefore took the nearest way, or tried to 
take it, the structural fashion of increments held firm. 

As dew in April 
That falleth on the flower. 

" He came al so still 
There his mother lay, 
As dew in April 
That falleth on the spray." 

Incremental repetition of the refrain (as in the short version of Lord 
Randal) is common in all lyric. 

1 Incremental repetition is here treated as characteristic of Germanic 
ballads. It occurs, of course, elsewhere, even in Armenian popular verse. 
French ballads have it in plenty: and further study would doubtless 
trace it through all the Romance tongues, and give it due importance. 



118 THE BALLAD 

Alien material had to fall into this mould; "Sir Lionel," 
"Hind Horn," are cases in point, and the latter ballad is 
most instructive when compared with the related "gest." 
So vital is this incremental system in the structure of 
ballads, that it not only dominates the main progress of a 
borrowed story, but even treats a detail of this story so as 
to make it conform in pattern with the rest. In " Kemp 
Owyne," * which nobody would claim for choral origins, 
one kiss in the popular tale becomes three kisses in the 
ballad, with incremental repetition of gifts, — belt, ring, 
brand. Parallel cases are innumerable, — for example, in 
a Norwegian ballad, 2 the three draughts of Lethean effect 
which make Little Kirstie, now the hill-king's queen, forget 
her former home. It is easy to see how this structure 
would be almost inevitable for the ballad of situation, pro- 
vided the situation still tended to absorb narrative and 
block an epic process which was bound to conquer in 
the long run. This epic process is first seen at the begin- 
ning and the end of a situation. A most popular ballad, 
spread, as Grundtvig says, 3 "over the whole north," tells 
of the princess who plays tables or dice with a boy, first 
her necklace against his old hat, where she wins, then her 
gold crown against his old coat, winning again, then her- 
self against his hose and shoon, — where she loses. The 
three casts have each three stanzas in strictest form of 
incremental repetition, except that two are in dialogue, 
and the third in narrative. Next, in rapid dialogue, with 

1 Child, no. 34. 2 Landstad, pp. 435 f., stanzas 16 ff. 

3 Danish version, T centring spiUet, iv, 402 ff . 



SITUATION AND REPETITION 119 

pairs of stanzas and no narrative at all, the girl offers 
silver-clasped knife, silken sarks. horse and saddle, at 
last the eastle itself, to be free, but in vain. Four stanzas 
of romantic conclusion then reveal "the best king's-son 
on earth. 5 ' and turn the despair of the princess to joy. 

We see the set of the tide. Explanations prefixed to 
this dramatic nucleus will soon give the desired details; 
events will be added, connected; and narrative will soon 
absorb the situation. Epic interest, here gratified only by 
those concluding stanzas, will prove stronger than dra- 
matic interest in the lingering game and in the climax 
of bribes. 1 Incremental repetition, ceasing to dominate 
the whole ballad, now passes from general structural form 
into a sort of formula of situations or topics which have 
become traditional and recur as old favorites in the new 
narrative ballads. Like the refrain, it will linger best in 
those ballads that belong to genuine popular tradition, and 
it will disappear utterly from such a ballad as "Lord 
Delamere," 2 where tradition is at a last stand, and the 
popular maker, with his drawling, perfunctory "Ri- 
toora-loora-la. ?? is disgustingly evident. 3 In genuine bal- 
lads it survives almost constantly in one of three forms: 

1 For brevity of narrative, intense and effective, vet retaining scraps 
of dialogue, see Le Pont des Moris, Crane, no. xix. 

2 Child, no. 507. 

3 Stall-copies, of course, can be fatal to incremental repetition, while 
it will linger in popular recitation of the same ballad. Compare versions 
A and D of James Harris, the Damon Lover, no. 243. See also Pro- 
fessor Child's remark ii, ISO' on "a copy of Lord Thomas and Fair 
Elliner written over for the ballad-mongers, and of course much less in 
the popular style." 



120 THE BALLAD 

it appears as necessary, effective expression of the situa- 
tion; as perfunctory mark of style, a mere manner, by 
no means inevitable; and as the ballad commonplace. 1 
Setting aside the small group of which "The Maid Freed 
from the Gallows " is type, we have a large and important 
class where situation is still dominant in one of its char- 
acteristic features and incremental repetition is a matter 
of course. Besides cases like "Babylon," there is the 
ballad where a "relative-climax" is a part and not the 
whole of the situation. Thus a wounded soldier calls 
vainly for water from father, mother, brother, sister, get- 
ting it at last from his sweetheart. This, of course, is 
developed by incremental verses. Precisely the opposite 
case occurs in "Clerk Saunders;" 2 of seven brothers 
who surprise their sister with her lover, six will spare him 
for this reason or that, but the seventh does what he 

1 There is but one other way to account for this structural peculiarity 
of ballads and at the same time discard popular origins. It might be 
urged that the formula, let us say, of the relative-climax was brought, 
as any good story is brought, from popular tales or wherever else, and 
applied in ballad verse. The result would be incremental repetition. 
Pleased with the smoothness and easy course of such structure, ballad- 
makers would use it on other occasions, and so it would get its vogue. 
But such an explanation flies in the face of all the evidence that we have 
gathered. It leaves unexplained that decrease of incremental repetition 
with the increase of epic elements. It ignores the obvious connection of 
ballad and dance. And it jars absolutely, fatally, with the facts of poetic 
evolution, where repetition, the common and original choral stuff, taking 
different lines of change, rules at first in popular verse, yields to epic 
necessity, and finally disappears amid the triumphs of full artistic 
control. 

2 No. 69. 



THE RELATIVE-CLIMAX 121 

thinks to be his duty. Another case combines relatives 
with a scheme of colors: a woman's father dies, — she 
will dress all in red ; the mother, — make it yellow ; the 
brother indicates green; and the sister white; "but if 
my dear husband dies, I will dress in black." * As might 
be expected, the climax is multiform; but it falls most 
readily into the system of triads, like those three cries for 
help, best shown in the German Ulinger: 2 the first cry is, 
Jesu, Marie Sone, the second Maria, du reine Maid, vain 
both, but the third and successful cry is to allerliebster 
Bruder mein, who rescues or else avenges his sister. The 
nearest and dearest may even be one's self. In the critical 
part of "Sir Andrew Barton," w^here the mast must be 
climbed, first it is the retainer, then the sister's son, none 
dearer, and finally Sir Andrew himself. In "The Cruel 
Brother " 3 the climax is an omission, — with fatal conse- 
quences. This formula is combined with that of the 
" legacy," a favorite end of tragic ballads; in " Edward " 4 
effective repetition leads from "poor wife" through "old 
son" to "mother dear," — who has for climax the "fire 
o' coals." Interesting by way of contrast to the old dra- 
matic and choral group is the incremental repetition in 
relative climax — like that of "Edward" — along with 
a quite perfunctory ballad commonplace. When Hughie 

1 See Child, ii, 347. 

2 See Child, introduction to no. 4, Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, 
for variants of these three cries, — for example, in the Bohemian, 
i,41. 

3 No. 11. 

4 No. 13, version A. 



122 THE BALLAD 

Grame * is awaiting a felon's death, he looks "over his 
left shoulder," and spies his father lamenting sorely; 
"peace, father; they can take life but not my hope of 
heaven;" then "over his right shoulder," and sees his 
mother tearing her hair; but now, for the third increment, 
instead of a minatory message, our ballad breaks lamely 
into anti-climax and makes Hughie wish merely to be 
" remembered to Peggy my wife," who had brought 
about his doom. Usually, however, like the "legacy" 
conclusion, the " climax of relatives" is effective enough. 
Thus when Lady Maisry's lover 2 arrives too late to save 
her from the flames lighted by her next of kin, he cries, — 

" * O I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, 
Your father and your mother; 
An I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, 
Your sister an your brother. 

"'An I'll gar burn for you, Maisry, 
The chief of a' your kin; 
And the last bonfire that I come to, 
Mysel I will cast in."' 

Best of all, in this respect, is the ballad of "The Twa 
Brothers" 3 with its wide contrast between two versions; 
one of them, with motive and conclusion almost wholly 
of the "Edward" type, goes back to the dramatic, choral 
class, has no narrative whatever, and is a single situation 
developed in the well-known way. It was 4 " sung after 

1 No. 191, A, stanzas 19-23. 

2 Child, no. 65, A. 

3 No. 49, A and I. 

4 See Child, v, 291. It is not necessary to assume direct borrowing 
from Edward. 



THE RELATIVE-CLIMAX 123 

a St. George play regularly acted on All Souls' Day at a 
village a few miles from Chester. . . . The play was 
introduced by a song . . . and followed by two songs of 
which this is the last, the tvhole dramatic company singing " 
The more familiar traditional version has an epic opening 
which tells the tragedy in a couple of stanzas; two bro- 
thers wrestle, presumably quarrel, 1 and one is stabbed by 
the other. As in the typical ballad of situation, this brief, 
straightforward bit of narrative is followed by dialogue 
and incremental repetition to the end. After vain attempts 
to stanch the flowing blood, Sir Willie carries Sir John 
to kirkyard, and the relative-climax follows in a most 
effective form : — 

" * But what will I say to my father dear, 

Should he chance to say, Willie, whar 's John ? ' 
8 Oh say that he ' s to England gone 
To buy him a cask of wine.' 

" * And what shall I say to my mother dear, 

Should she chance to say, Willie, whar 's John ? ' 
1 Oh say that he *s to England gone 
To buy her a new silk gown.' 

'"And what will I say to my sister dear, 

Should she chance to say, Willie, whar 's John?' 
1 Oh say that he 's to England gone 
To buy her a wedding ring.' 

" ■ But what will I say to her you loe dear, 
Should she cry, Why tarries my John?' 

1 Professor Child prefers this assumption as accenting the generosity 
of the victim. The absurdity of the brothers attending school, pointed out 
in B where they are "little," really applies to A; the corruption is in this 
detachable narrative explanation. See above, p. 92. 



124 THE BALLAD 

'Oh tell her I lie in fair Kirkland 
And home will never come.' " * 

This is art; but it is an unconscious art, due in the first 
instance to the old choral conditions. Indeed, instead 
of developing under epic treatment, this incremental 
repetition in the climax of relatives tends, like other 
forms and formulas, to disappear; in "Bonny Lizie 
Baillie" and "Glasgow Peggie," 2 corrupted and dis- 
ordered ballads, it is present in a very mangled state. 
Still more significant is its progress into the mechanical 
and the unmeaning, and even into burlesque. An inferior 
but lively ballad, " Glenlogie," 3 makes father and mother 
give their daughter quite profitless counsel, and then puts 
"her father's chaplain" in the climax of consolation. 4 In 
another ballad, 5 sister, brother, mother, and father come 
successively in and call Janet a vile name; she defends 
herself; then in comes her old nurse weeping, warning 

1 This "very pathetic passage," as Professor Child calls it, i, 436, 
ranging it with a few similar cases, " is too truly a touch of nature to be 
found only here." We are therefore relieved for once of the painful 
necessity of deciding whether A copied B or B copied A. But on other 
accounts the increments in this stanza are noteworthy throughout. A 
somewhat similar Flemish use of the relative-climax is where in Hale- 
wijun the girl says to father, brother, sister of the dead man that he is 
dallying somewhere, but to the mother that he is dead. 

2 Nos. 227, 228. 

3 No. 238, A. 

4 He is like the Flemish shrift-father in Roland, who gives Louise 
the permission refused by father, mother, and brother. See also no. 73, 
I, Child, iv, 469. 

5 Lady Maisry, version B; compare I. The incremental repetition is 
very effective. Artistic poetry has another way of managing such a 
climax: compare Tennyson's Home they Brought her Warrior Dead. 



BURLESQUE 125 

Janet of her fate, and offering a messenger to run with 
news to the lover. A version of "Lord Thomas and Fair 
Annet," very disordered, it is true, makes the hero visit his 
father and get bad advice, while a sister's son (" sat on the 
nurse's knee") gives nobler counsel, which is communi- 
cated further and superfluously to mother, brother, and 
sister. This is confusion. Actual burlesque, always a 
proof of antecedent popularity, reaches this climax of 
relatives in a version of the " Mermaid," * still beloved for 
its swing and its lively chorus. Captain, mate, and boat- 
swain of the doomed ship cry incrementally that their 
wives will soon be widows; when 

"... next bespake the little cabbin-boy, 

And a well bespoke boy was he: 
'I am as sorry for my mother dear 

As you are for your wives all three,' " — 

pathetic enough; but in the burlesque it runs: — 

" Out and spoke the cook of our ship, 
And a rusty old dog was he; 
Says, T am as sorry for my pots and pans 
As you are for your wives all three.' " 

So much for the use of incremental repetition in a com- 
manding motive or typical, important formula. 2 Ballads 

1 No. 289. A is serious; E is the burlesque. 

2 If incremental repetition appeared only in these formulas of relative- 
climax, best of three, legacy, and what not, which themselves occur not 
only in ballads, but in folk tales and other forms of literature, then one 
could argue that borrowing could account for it and its origin need not 
be sought in choral conditions of the primitive ballad. The point is that 
incremental repetition is the fundamental fact in ballad structure, 



126 THE BALLAD 

clung to the art of it, and often the narrative halts to 
admit a touch of the old device. In "Bewick and 
Grahame," a father tells his son to choose: "fight your 
sworn-brother or fight me." — "Fight a man that's faith 
and troth to me? How can I do it? " — 

" 'What 's that thou sayst, thou limmer loon? 
Or how dare thou stand to speak to me? 
If thou do not end this quarrel soon, 
Here is my glove, thou shalt fight me.' 

"Christy stoop'd low unto the ground, 

Unto the ground, as you '11 understand, 1 

'O father, put on your glove again; 

The wind hath blown it from your hand.' 

" ' What 's that thou sayst, thou limmer loon ? 
Or how dare thou stand to speak to me? 
If thou do not end this quarrel soon, 
Here is my hand, thou shalt fight me.'" 

This second class of survivals in incremental repetition 
now nearly touches, as here, the old dramatic and domi- 
nant note, and now falls almost to commonplace; in these 
cases it is permanence of structural form, and so far vital, 
— not a mere unintelligent habit. "Lord Ingram and 
Chiel Wyet," 2 a traditional ballad, shows this structural 
permanence in its five opening stanzas; incremental 
repetition leads up to the cause of tragedy, but in no 

belongs not to ballads, but to the ballad, and occurs under all circum- 
stances, great or trivial. Borrowing is an impossible theory in this case. 

1 Note the mixture of traditional and ballad-mongering styles; the 
matter is distinctly good, with this pathetically urged excuse for the 
father's brutality. 

2 No. 66, A. 



INCREMENTAL REPETITION 127 

dramatic situation, and with the relative-climax * sub- 
ordinate. In other words, the ballad, bound to set forth 
certain facts, chooses the old structural method and holds 
it to the end. In shorter compass, incremental repeti- 
tion gives an emphatic effect : 2 — 

" They had na been a week from her, 
A week but barely ane, 
When word came to the carline wife 
That her three sons were gane. 

" They had na been a week from her, 
A week but barely three, 
When word came to the carline wife 
That her sons she'd never see." 3 

Frequently such a formula is reduced from stanzas to 
lines, but keeps the proportion : — 

* She's led him in thro ae dark door, 

And sae has she thro nine; 
She's laid him on a dressing-table 
And stickit him like a swine. 

" And first came out the thick, thick blood, 
And syne came out the thin, 
And syne came out the bonny heart's blood; 
There was nae mair within." 4 

Here one approaches the third class, the commonplace, 5 
the repetition without any reason save that it is remem- 

1 Here the "asking permission" with climax of the lady herself, as in 
Katharine J affray. 

2 The Wife of Usher's Well, no. 79. 

3 Compare the similar structure, pretty enough in its place, quoted 
above on p. 116, note 4. 

4 Sir Hugh, no. 155, A. 

5 For ballad commonplaces in general, see below, Chap. IV. 



128 THE BALLAD 

bered and applied appositely or grotesquely as the case 
may be. It is hard to draw the line of division. Exi- 
gencies of the stanza, not mere remembrance, force an old 
proverb into this form: — 

"And mony ane sings o' grass, o' grass, 
And mony ane sings o' corn, 
And mony ane sings o' Robin Hood 
Kens little whare he was born," * — 

which may be contrasted, for its nugatory pair of ante- 
cedent repetitions, with the famous stanza: — 

" Methinks I hear the thresel-cock, 
Methinks I hear the jaye; 
Methinks I hear my Lord Barnard, 
And I would I were away." 2 

Repetition is so pervasive as to become inconsistent, but 
not quite commonplace, in a traditional version of "Sir 
Patrick Spens: " 3 — 

" Laith, laith were our Scottish lords 
To weit their coal-black shoon; 
But yet ere a' the play was play'd, 
They wat their hats aboon. 

" Laith, laith were our Scottish lords 
To weit their coal-black hair; 
But yet ere a' the play was play'd, 
They wat it every hain " — 

1 No. 102, A, 17. See also the next stanza. 

2 No. 81, A; better perhaps in B: — 

" ■ Methinkes I heare Lord Barnett's home ; 
Away, Musgreve, away I ' " 

3 No. 58, B, 12 f. 



INCREMENTAL REPETITION 129 

while in another version, 1 one stanza puts the drowned 

Scots lords at Sir Patrick's head, and the corresponding 

stanza neatly groups them at his feet. On the other side 

of the account, a famous pair of stanzas from this ballad, 

with the same relation, are rightly praised by Professor 

Child: 2 — 

" O lang, lang may their ladies sit 
Wi their fans into their hand 
Or eir they se Sir Patrick Spence 
Cum sailing to the land. 

" O lang, lang may the ladies stand 
Wi thair gold kerns in their hair, 
Waiting for thair ain deir lords, 
For they '11 see thame na mair." 3 

This is no commonplace. Commonplace is the unneces- 
sarily repeated choice of three, — as with horses of differ- 
ent colors, inevitable at certain stages of certain ballads, 
and wearisome enough. This commonplace, however, 
may at any time become effective through the situation; 
so in " Mary Hamilton" the heroine is told to put on her 
robes 4 of black or else her robes of brown, but refuses, 
repeating the negative for each, and adds : — 

1 No. 58, F, 13 f. 

2 A, 9, 10. "It would be hard to point out in ballad poetry, or 
other, happier and more refined touches." — These touches are due 
entirely to the incremental repetition and its suggestion. 

3 This is completely spoiled in J, where the sequence of three stanzas 
puts the fan into Lady Spens's hand, the tear into her ee, and the black 
shoon on her feet, — probably for mourning purposes. 

4 Color repetition often becomes inconsistent, as in the Swedish 
ballad, above, p. 89. 



130 THE BALLAD 

"But I'll put on my robes of white, 
To shine thro Edinbro town." 

So, too, in the French "Renaud," companion piece to 
'Clerk Colvill," where the widow asks what robe she 
shall wear, and the mother replies : — 

" ' Mettez le blanc, mettez le gris, 
Mettez le noir pour mieux choisi'.' " 

But these happy touches lie not in the structural plan; 
what concerns us now is incremental repetition as a 
formula of no aesthetic or dramatic value in its particular 
application. Such a formula as that of the page and 
the " broken briggs" often becomes superfluous; often, 
again, the singer is simply using traditional phrases for a 
traditional case. A list of " commonplaces " in both kinds 
is printed under that name in the last volume of Professor 
Child's collection; l it includes plenty of incremental 
repetition, — as where poison is put to cheek, chin, lips, 
or when one steps into water, once to knee, then to 
middle, then to neck, 2 or where bells are rung at the first 
kirk and Mass said at the next. But such commonplace, 
though often individually identical, must not be con- 
fused in kind with the capital tendency of ballad struc- 
ture to run its material, whatever the origin, into this 
mould. In that ancient and sterling ballad of "Child 
Maurice," for example: — 

" 'And heere I send her a mantle of greene, 
As greene as any grasse, 

1 Vol. v, 474 f. 

2 Lady Isabel, B, 4 ff.; Child Waters, B, 7 ff. 



INCREMENTAL REPETITION 131 

And bidd her come to the silver wood 
To hunt with Child Maurice. 

" * And there I send her a ring of gold, 
A ring of precious stone, 
And bidd her come to the silver wood, 
Let for no kind of man,' " — 

one has the ballad structure not as a commonplace, but 
as a law of literary form, independent, sui generis, and 
found nowhere else. It is not a commonplace in the 
literal sense, but a case of structural law, a category, 
inflexible in its form, but perfectly amenable to change 
of material and contents, as may be seen by comparing 
the corresponding passage in the Scottish traditional 
version : — 

"'Here is a glove, a glove,' he said, 
'Lined with the silver grey; 
You may tell her to come to the merry greenwood, 
To speak to Child Nory. 

" 'Here is a ring, a ring,' he says, 
Tt 's all gold but the stane; 
You may tell her to come to the merry greenwood, 
And ask the leave o' nane.' " 

It may vex the hurrying reader now and then, and offend 
by mere silliness, — 

"He lean'd him twofold o'er a staff, 
So did he threefold o'er a tree," x — 

or by superfluity, as when an effective single stanza in the 
1 Gude Wallace, no. 157, A, 9. 



132 THE BALLAD 

t 
song of "Waly, Waly" is ineffectively doubled in the 

later ballad : 1 — 

" Whan we came through Glasgow toun, 
We was a comely sight to see; 
My gude lord in velvet green, 
And I mysel in cramasie. 

"Whan we cam to Douglas toun, 
We was a fine sight to behold; 
My gude lord in cramasie, 

And I myself in shining gold." 

Structure and situation have here nothing in common; 
the style does not fit the facts. On the other hand, a 
Kentish version of "Lamkin," 2 formed in this way 
throughout, although it has no literary interest, has its 
strong dramatic traditional interest, and justifies even the 
superfluity of daughters, Lady Betty, Lady Nelly, Lady 
Jenny, and the ominous "etc." which surrenders this 
ballad at discretion. 

It is the fate of the popular muse that she is credited 
with nothing but the trivial, the commonplace, the harm- 
lessly absurd; whatsoever is more than these, critics as- 
sign to one of her high-born sisters. But there can be no 
doubt that in the long reaches of tradition, and in the 

1 Jamie Douglas, no. 204, A, Child, iv, 93. This is from the recitation 
of one who had it from an old dairywoman. The traditional ballad 
turns instinctively to this repetition. Some of Buchan's copies are of 
this structure from end to end; noteworthy is The Baron o' Leys> 
no. 241, C. Changing dress at this, that, and yonder town is common: 
cf. Le Capitaine et la Fille Prisonniere, Puymaigre, no. xii (p. 44) — the 
first town blue satin, the second in diamonds, the third for the wedding. 

2 No. 93, K, Child, ii, 233. 



POPULAR .ESTHETIC ELEMENTS 133 

wide sweep of choral song, aesthetic elements have been 
produced which the poet has only copied and perfected, 
and which still appeal in their own rude, unconscious art. 
One has but to think of the high poetic uses to which 
genius has put the communal refrain in a hymeneal of 
Catullus or Spenser, and of the refinement, often to arti- 
fice, which it has undergone in forms like the roundel and 
the ballade. These are rescues; despite the waning vogue 
of choral poetry, despite the epic processes, the literary 
invasion, repetition as the main mark of choral structure 
in verse retained some of its old power amid its old 
haunts. Unable to keep its larger vitality, incremental 
repetition still refused to disappear from the ballad ; one 
may think of that pretty myth of the dew, burned away 
from field and lawn, but still glistening in the copses. 
It is the legacy of an early and a popular art, no invention 
of the poet in a library. It is the genius of the ballad itself, 
formally expressed, springing from quite intelligible con- 
ditions of a singing, dancing, dramatic festal throng; 
hence the unique and ancient appeal of this stretched 
metre at its best. 

"'If the child be mine, Faire Ellen,' he sayd, 
'Be mine, as you tell me, 
Take you Cheshire and Lancashire both, 
Take them your own to be. 

"'If the child be mine, Faire Ellen,' he sayd, 
'Be mine, as you doe sweare, 
Take you Cheshire and Lancashire both 
And make that child your heyre.' 



134 THE BALLAD 

"She saies, *I had rather have one kisse, 
Child Waters, of thy mouth, 
Than I would have Cheshire and Lancashire both, 
That lyes by north and south. 

"'And I had rather have a twinkling, 
Child Waters, of your eye, 
Than I would have Cheshire and Lancashire both, 
To take them mine owne to bee.' " * 

1 As a matter of mere statistics, incremental repetition is found con- 
sistently, and mostly along with the refrain, in all the ballads which are 
grouped by Professor Child as oldest and nearest the primitive type; 
when exceptions occur, it is almost certain that the fault is with the 
record, — an impatient editor or collector, an economic publisher. 
Comparing the manuscript collections in the library of Harvard Univer- 
sity with editions made from them, one notes short cuts and evasions 
of this kind, now trifling and now grave. For the rest of the ballads, a 
careful examination shows that more than one half of these retain the 
structural feature, reverting to it at the most important and the most 
unimportant moments, that is to say, for accenting a motive, a deed, a 
situation, and for rendering a commonplace. The long chronicle bal- 
lads, and the lowest types of the broadsides, ignore it altogether. 




CHAPTER II 
THE BALLADS 

I. THE OLDEST GROUPS 

NGLISH and Scottish ballads may be 
grouped according to their subject, their 
form, their relative age. The oldest bal- 
lads, apart from any question about the 
time when they were recorded or rescued from oral tra- 
dition, have mainly a stanza of two verses, a constant 
refrain, and the mark of verbal repetition in its most dis- 
tinct shape; they are placed by Professor Child in the 
forefront of his collection ; and first of all stands a ballad 
of riddles. 

Along with gnomic poetry of varying kinds, the riddle 
is of quite immemorial age. Together they formed a 
counterpart to those great chorals of primitive verse 
which dealt with deeds and things; and this intellectual 
invasion of poetry can still be traced in low stages of 
culture. The Botocudos of South America sang, and 
are probably still singing, in chorus of almost endless 
repetition, short sentences which not only laid down the 
lines of epic, as "Good hunting to-day," but also em- 
bodied the result of scientific observation and blazed a 
path for later wisdom-literature and didactic: "Brandy 
is good ! " This little gnomic song can be matched by 



136 THE BALLADS 

a formal collection, a didactic poem, in Anglo-Saxon, 
where there are long sequences of statements not a whit 
more incisive or complicated than Botocudan lore, — 
"frost will freeze, and fire will burn," for an example. 
Between epic and didactic lie the versus memoriales 
which Anglo-Saxon preserves in its oldest recorded poem, 
the "Lay of Widsith,"as a very ancient form of history: — 

" Atla ruled Huns, Eormanric Goths; " — 

but it is clear that the " sentence," the piece of pure 
wisdom, was an early favorite in choral verse. Lovers 
of the deep things in poetry, who are inclined to sneer 
at such commonplace, should analyze the wisdom of 
the moderns and reduce a metaphysical poet, old or 
new, to intelligible prose. Primitive verse put its abstrac- 
tions simply; or else, by an easy change, posed a frank 
little problem for intellectual effort. Our riddle ballad 
is still a plain affair, in sharp contrast to the far older, 
yet far more intricate riddles of Anglo-Saxon record, 
which were translated from a Latin source, as well as 
to the half-scientific questions and answers in a com- 
pilation like " Solomon and Saturn." Whether or not all 
the "catechism" literature of that time, mainly about 
the sky and the seasons, is to be referred to Greek 
sources, there was a short, simple question, now in verse 
and now in prose, which the people always loved, and 
which men of later times, like Handle Holmes, 1 copied 

1 MS. Harl. 1960. See Tupper, Publications Mod. Lang. Assoc, 1903, 
xviii, 211 ff. On the riddle chap-books see Petsch, Palaestra, iv, 6 ff. 



RIDDLE BALLADS 137 

into a commonplace book, precisely as they copied ballad 
and song. Even now, this sort of question has its vogue 
in rural districts and in the upper classes of the nursery ; 
and for older days not only did a learned riddle, par- 
ticularly if its learning were biblical, drift among the peo- 
ple, but literary collections were often recruited from the 
popular supply. In the "Demaundes Joyous," printed 
after the French in 1511, "Which," it is asked, "is the 
moost profytable beest and that man eteth least of ? — 
This is Bees." 

In ballads, one has to distinguish t he riddles made 
or produced in the throng from those of the minstrel's 
stock in trade. Tragemund, — perhaps " interpreter," 
dragoman, — in the old German ballad, 1 is a "travel- 
ling man," the Widsith of riddles, who answers long 
lists of questions with consummate ease; some of them 
have found their way into English ballads. But it is 
a fact that the riddle belonged originally with the popu- 
lar festal dance. To this day a riddle is put by prefer- 
ence in rime; in older days it was sung, and was an- 
swered by song; and there is plenty of evidence that 
all went once to choral measure. Radloff gives us a 
glimpse of primitive conditions among the Tartar tribes 
of Siberia, where a public assembly is amused by the 
improvised flyting of sundry singers or by a riddle-contest 
in song. A girl who takes part in such a contest first 

1 "Wager and Wish-Songs" is Uhland's division; and he says they 
are "sprung from social intercourse," — probably true for ultimate ori- 
gins. See his Abhandlungen iiber die deutschen Volkslieder, pp. 181 ff. 



138 THE BALLADS 

flouts her opponent, then flatters, and finally falls into 
a series of riddles or questions : what was first created ? 
who was so-and-so's father ? why do the waters freeze ? 
The other singer answers every riddle, so that the girl 
fairly resigns the game and presents him with a coat as 
prize of victory. In repetition, variation, interlaced 
stanza, these riddle and flyting verses from Siberia are 
amazingly like the Scottish and German ballads, al- 
though there is no possible link between them. Instead 
of rivalry at the dance, a little story frames the Scottish 
ballad contest: 1 — 

"There was a knicht riding from the east, 
(Sing the Gather banks, the bonnie brume) 
Wha had been wooing at monie a place. 
(And ye may beguile a young thing sune)." 

This strange knight asks a widow for her three daughters; 
the youngest, who is of course brightest, is put to the 

test : — 

" ' O what is heigher nor the tree ? 
And what is deeper nor the sea ? ' " 

he asks in a series of questions which end with a chal- 
lenge to name something "worse than a woman;" and 
she answers all, affirming that "Clootie," the devil, is 
worse than woman. The fiend, named and revealed, 
goes off in fire. 

One must sunder the good riddle, which is kept for 
its own sake, and either teaches by its truth or pleases 

1 No. 1, C, from recitation. — The riddle tales, of course, run on 
the same plan. 



RIDDLE BALLADS 139 

by its ingenuity, from the riddles which only serve to 
help the situation and fill out the story. A variant of the 
riddle flyting, very interesting in the present case, matches 
one question or demand not by its answer but by an- 
other question or demand. Usually these alternate; but 
in "The Elfin Knight" * a clever maid wins her victory, 
baffling the elf, by a torrent and cumulation of desire 
for impossible things in answer to his request for a sark 
without any cut or hem, made without knife, shears, 
needle and thread. "Plow," she says, "plow with your 
horn my land by the sea, sow it with your corn, build 
a cart of stone and lime and let Robin Redbreast draw 
it home, barn it in a mouse-hole, thresh it in the sole 
of your shoe, winnow it in the palm of your hand, and 
sack it in your glove!" Baring-Gould gives a version 
once "sung as a sort of game in farm-houses" of Corn- 
wall "between a young man who went outside the room, 
and a girl who sat on the settle, . . . and a sort of chorus 
of farm lads and lasses," a most interesting survival. 2 
Indeed, the earliest form of this type of ballad was made 
in actual dances; the strenuous "long dance" of Hol- 
stein still goes to such a song. Like the ballad of the sprin- 
geltanz, and like the cumulative ballad sung at the dance 

1 No. 2. See, also, Child, iv, 439. 

2 The present writer remembers a sort of yokel flyting, where recip- 
rocal challenges were given in prose to perform an impossible task. 
"Rub the sunshine off that wall!" — "You wheel all the smoke out 
of the smokehouse." — These "demands joyous" soon passed the 
bourn of propriety; but the "smoke house" request was evidently 
traditional. 



140 THE BALLADS 

of the Frisians, this song of the long dance is an affair 
of choosing partners, perhaps an old wedding measure. 1 

" * I know a pretty maiden, 

I would that she were mine ; 
I'll marry her, if from oaten straw 
She'll spin me silk so fine.' 

" * And must I out of oaten straw 
Spin thee silk so fine, 
Then make thou me some brave new clothes 
Out of the leaves o' line.' 

"'And must I make thee brave new clothes 
Out of the leaves o' line, 
Go now and fetch for me the shears 
From out the midst of Rhine.' " 

So it flies back and forth, with interlaced quatrains, as 
in the Siberian song ; but all in time to steps and move- 
ments of the dance, and in that form of incremental re- 
petition which the situation demands. 2 There can be no 

1 Riddles are asked at weddings in Russia. — Child, i, 418. 

2 French songs of the dance have been studied in Jeanroy's admir- 
able Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France. There one sees how a 
dance, with its song of the leader and the refrain of the dancers, could 
lapse and leave the song itself by perfectly plain steps to proceed through 
stage after stage to such apparently artificial forms as the rondeau and 
its complications. The name, however, like "ballad," betrays its origin 
in a popular dance. When the entire throng of dancers sang and acted, 
say, a song of bride-chasing, then a ballad, not a folk song, would re- 
sult and did result. J. Bedier, "Les plus anciennes danses francaises," 
in Rev. d. d. Mondes, Jan. 15, 1906, gives some interesting evidence 
of this sort. The refrains can be traced back into the thirteenth century. 
For German dance-songs combined with the riddle, see Uhland on the 
Kranzlieder in his Abhand. z. d. VolksL, p. 208. For repeated and inter- 
laced stanzas in old Portuguese lyric, and their origin in the chorus 



RIDDLE BALLADS 141 

doubt that our own riddle ballads go back to such a 
dance, but they were too popular not to fall into the 
epic procession. The mere flash of riddle and answer, 
the thrust and parry of alternate demand for impossible 
things, might well satisfy a festal and choral throng; 
but in the popular tale these demands were converted 
into the story of an actual quest with triumphant results, 
and in the narrative ballad they could be fused with a 
motive of courtship, an ordinary, every-day affair, or else 
blend with the supernatural. "Captain Wedderburn's 
Courtship," * for example, reverses the Elfin Knight's 
proceedings. The captain carries off his lass; she re- 
fuses to marry him until he has brought her sundry im- 
possible things; but our ingenious officer reduces these 
to wares of any market. "Get me a chicken without a 
bone," she says; and "here's your egg," counters the 
captain. So it goes on until the maid resigns her game. 
"Now she's Mrs. Wedderburn," concludes the ballad, 
with a final change rung on its jingling and saucy re- 
frain. Here is broad Scottish daylight. "King John and 
the Bishop," however, a far-come story, has its roots in 
oriental folklore; while "Proud Lady Margaret" is 
shadowed by unnatural dark. The knight who seeks this 
lady in her bower, and is told to guess certain riddles 
or die, turns out to be a brother come back from the 
grave "to humble her haughty heart." Question and 

of a communal dance, see H. R. Lang, Liederbuch d. konigs Denis, 
pp. xcv, cxxxviii ff. 

1 No. 46; the next ballads named are 45 and 47. 



142 THE BALLADS 

answer are no longer in the foreground, and romance 
is dominant. 

As with form, so with material. Like incremental re- 
petition in structure, this old notion of impossible things 
becomes a ballad commonplace, an equivalent for the 
Greek kalends; not till crows are white, swans are black, 
stones float, "when cockle-shells grow siller bells," or 
"till salt and oatmeal grow both of a tree," this or that 
will be done. 

" ' Whan will ye come hame again, Willie ? 
Now Willie, tell to me.' 
* When the sun and moon dances on the green, 
And that will never be.' " * 

More romantic, but of the same piece, is Scott's pretty 
verse about the rose in winter-snow. "Never," of course, 
is the word for all this; now and then, however, fche im- 
possible is assumed as possible through magic] and we 
have the companion piece to many popular tales. What 
Professor Child calls a "base-born" but lively little bal- 
lad, "The Twa Magicians," 2 describes the pursuit of 
a lady by a coal-black smith. 

" O bide, lady, bide, 

And aye he bade her bide; 
The rusty smith your leman shall be 
For a' your muckle pride," — 

runs a lively chorus; and there is no difficulty in think- 
ing of this ballad as an actual dance, with rapid changes 

1 No. 49, D; and note the long sequence in no. 299. Child's list, i, 
437, includes foreign sources. 

2 No. 44. The French versions are more delicate. See Crane, no. xxx. 



FLYTINGS 143 

of figure to suit transformations of the lady from dove 

to eel, to duck, to hare, of the smith from "another dove" 

to trout, to drake, to greyhound, and so to less romantic 

conclusions. The blacksmith wins, and the piece has 

a defiant, half- scurrilous tone; it has strayed into evil 

courses, although it confesses a nobler origin. Another 

ballad, where by implication the maid wins her flyting 

and her case, has wandered very far from the old ways, 

and seems quite alien to popular tradition. Professor 

Child was right, however, in making room for "The 

Gardener." x "Can you fancy me," says a gardener to 

the leal maiden who goes by, "to be my bride? You'll 

get all my flowers for clothing, — the lily for smock, 

gillyflowers on your head, gown of the sweet-william, 

coat of ' camovine,' apron of salads, stockings of the 

broad kail-blade, and gloves of marygold." She answers 

with a farewell and a return offer of clothing from no 

summer flowers : — 

" * The new-fallen snow to be your smock, 
Becomes your body neat; 
And your head shall be deck'd with the eastern wind, 
And the cold rain on your breast.' " 

Popular fancy, and the chances of tradition, varied this 

sort of thing at will. Dr. Thomas Davidson remembered 

a fragment of the Aberdeenshire version : — 

" ' The steed that ye sail ride upon 
Sail be o' the frost sae snell; 
And I'll saddle him wi' the norlan winds, 
And some sharp showers o' hail.' " 

1 No. 219. 



144 THE BALLADS 

From these flyting- verses to outright imprecation is no 
long journey. The evil wish 1 was a dread weapon for 
antiquity, provided one knew his gramarye ; and magic, 
with werewolves and whatever other transformations, 
was but a step or so into the dark. Elaborate impre- 
cation, however, apart from stock phrases like " an ill 
death may you die," makes little figure in the ballads. 
We find the regular last will and testament of curses 
at the end of "Edward," of "Lord Randal," and of 
some other ballads; 2 but it forms no part of the story. 
Solemn, and to some extent effective, is the imprecation 
of the "Wife of Usher's Well :" — 

" * I wish the wind may never cease, 
Nor fashes in the flood, 
Till my three sons come hame to me 
In earthly flesh and blood.' " 

That old woman, again, who kneels on the plank over 
black water, and bans Robin Hood, 3 is impressive enough, 
and one laments the lost stanzas which told more of 
her; she and the women who weep for the outlaw's 
case are weird sisters indeed, heightening the sense of 
coming doom and playing almost as romantic a part 
as the old nobleman who curses Triboulet in "Le Roi 
S 'Amuse." But there is very little of this in the bal- 

1 The late classical and sophisticated example, of course, is Ovid's 
Ibis. In Ireland the old bards were particularly dreaded. 

2 For a notable series of such wish-legacies to the culpable rela- 
tives, see the end of version I of The Maid Freed from the Gallows, 
no. 95. 

3 Robin Hood's Death, st. 8. 



DOMESTIC COMPLICATIONS 145 

lads. The mother's malison, in a ballad of that title, is 
unnatural; and only wildest anguish can account for 
Fair Annie's cry : * — 

" ■ Gin iny seven sons were seven young rats, 
Running on the castle wa\ 
And I were a gray cat mysell, 
I soon would worry them a'. 

" * Gin my seven sons were seven young hares, 
Running o'er yon lilly lee, 
And I were a grew-hound mysell, 
Soon worried they a' should be ! "' * 

"Fair Annie" with her wild wish has brought us far 
from the riddles and the flytings; this ballad is within 
measurable distance of romance, and echoes withal the 
tragedy of domestic complications. Yet we have made 
no detour, Dnm eisti^ rorfl ]^icg.ijfln , in the widest range of 
the term, furnishes a theme for the majority of English 
and Scottish ballads; and there will be no better way to 
approach our task of describing them in their narrative 
essence than by this well-trodden path of the stolen sweet- 
heart or bride. Moreover, one begins thus with a general 

1 See nos. 216 and 62. 

2 The deserted or cruelly treated maid, in a stanza too effective to 
be called commonplace, wishes all the evil for herself, and all the good 
either for her false lover or for her unborn child. See the stanza from 
Child Waters (no. 63), quoted below, or this from the song which 
goes with Jamie Douglas (no. 204) : — 

" ' Oh, oh, if my young babe were born, 
And set upon the nurse's knee, 
And I my sell were dead and gane ! 
For a maid again I '11 never be.' " 



146 THE BALLADS 

and human fact; the theme of family woes, in its main 
outlines, needs as little to be borrowed from some other 
" source" as the basal idea of having a family needs 
to be borrowed from race to race. A few primary in- 
stincts are still conceded even by the comparative folk. 
"Fair Annie," to be sure, is found also in Danish and 
Swedish versions ; it tells a story which Marie de France 
told seven centuries ago, from an old Breton tale, in her 
"Lai del Fresne;" and behind both ballad and tale lies 
a common source "too far back for us to find." Yet it 
must be said that the material, so far as situation and 
action are concerned, lay everywhere at hand in the 
life out of which tale and ballad sprang. 1 A knight from 
over sea, doing the grand tour of those days, steals Annie 
and takes her home. She bears him seven sons and 
rules his house, till he bethinks him to get a lawful wife 
with shiploads of dower. His choice falls unwittingly 
on Fair Annie's sister, whom he brings to his castle, 
and who hears the "imprecation," quoted above, just 
in time to adjust matters, give her "tocher" to the old 
love, and "gae maiden hame." The complication and 
adjustment, this recognition motive, so effective at a crisis 
and so dear to Euripides, is found in a few other ballads, 
in "Babylon," "Child Maurice," "Horn," and belongs 

1 So in the Scandinavian ballads : "Perhaps no set of incidents is 
repeated so often in northern ballads as the forcing of the bower on 
the strand, the giving of keepsakes," and so on, says Mr. Child of the 
Gil Brenton group. In the Faroes it is the robbing of a girl by Frisian 
pirates. Quidquid agunt homines is a good source, and borrowing is 
not necessary for original motives. 



VARIANTS OF THE STOLEN BRIDE 147 

of course to an incipient romance; but the robbery of a 
bride or sweetheart was common stuff and found fre- 
quent dramatic, choral presentation in ballads of the 
primitive type like that Faroe song of the Frisian 
pirates and its English version of "The Maid Freed 
from the Gallows." This is fundamental; the later epic 
process falls into two general classes. Either it connects 
with legend of the countryside, and so simply echoes 
the life of its makers and transmitters, or else it attracts 
to itself a motive or a story of international interest, 
a touch of old myth, a complex of partly local and 
partly foreign supernatural lore. Thus we have a short 
but intense "local" ballad, — "Earl Brand," let us 
say, — with purely human interest; or else a "Lady 
Isabel and the Elf Knight," with store of uncanny asso- 
ciations. These have still the mark of choral origins, 
in their incremental structure, their brevity, their fond- 
ness for the dramatic situation. Farthest from choral 
origins, an affair for the reciter rather than the singer, 
is the long, leisurely, "elegant" ballad of the type of 
"King Estmere." It will be well to look more care- 
fully at these three types. 

For the choral foundation, much has been said already 
in the discussion of "The Maid Freed from the Gallows;" 
but that is not a ballad of bride-stealing, however the 
Faroe version seems to point out such an origin. Luckily 
the Ditmarsh folk in Holstein come again to the rescue 
with a genuine ballad which they used for their trymme- 
Jcen dance, and doubtless once made in the dance itself; 



148 THE BALLADS 

it reflects a perfectly simple fact of those old days in a 
dramatic form which has already absorbed sundry epic 
elements, and, by the hazard and imperfections of record, 
has dropped sundry choral and dramatic features, re- 
ducing its incremental repetition, and evidently cutting 
out many details. What carried it as actual " ballad," 
held the swing of the dancers, and contributed in no 
small degree to its vogue, was the refrain, which was 
sung as a chorus alternating with the lines of the text, 
not as a "burden" or undersong : — 

" Sir Henry and his brothers, brothers all three, 

— With power — 

They built them a boatie, a boatie for the sea, 

— All for the noble roseflower. 

"And when the boatie, the boatie ready was, 

— With power — 

They sat them all within it, they sailed far away, 

— All for the noble roseflower. 

" When they westward, westward well had come, 

— With power — 

There stood at his threshold a goldsmith's son, 

— All with the noble roseflower. 

" ' Be ye now welcome, ye gentles all three, 

— So fine and so fair — 

And will ye now mead, or will ye now wine? ' 

— Said the noble roseflower. 

" ' We will not have the mead, we will not have the wine, 
— With power — 
But we will have the goldsmith's daughter so fine 

— The noble roseflower.' 



SIR HENRY 149 

"'The goldsmith's daughter, 't is she ye shall not get, 

— So fine and so fair — 

For all to Little Loike her trothword is set, 

— The noble roseflower.' 

" 'Little Loike, his bride he never shall get, 
— With power — 
On that we three men will wager our necks 

— For the noble roseflower.' 

" Little Loike he drew out his shining brand 

— With power — 

Henry's little finger he's hewed from the hand 

— For the noble roseflower. 

" Sir Henry, he drew out his shining brand 

— So fine and so fair — 

Little Loike's head he has hewed sheer away, 

— For the noble roseflower. 

" ' Lie there, thou ancient, thou curly poll, 

— With power — 

My heart with a thousand joys it is full 

— For the noble roseflower.' 

" Little Loike's children they wept so sore 

— With power — 
'Tomorrow we must bury our father dear 

—For the noble roseflower.' " 

This old ballad was thought by Mullenhoff to have been 
in its original form a kind of sword-dance; 1 but as it 
stands, it was used for a very strenuous and very drama- 
tic dance, full of adventurous steps and gestures, in which 
all the festal throng took part. In its long career, as we 

1 See Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, chap, ix, for the popular origins 
and the survivals in England. 



150 THE BALLADS 

have said, it has surely suffered both abbreviation and 
corruption of the text; for the original " ballad " we must 
restore the activity and purpose of Henry's brothers, 
here inactive, silent, and apparently superfluous. Their 
parts have been cut. So, in many French ballads, three 
girls, three young fellows, three cavaliers, three barons, 
three drummers, and so on, appear in due introduction; 
but only one of the three does or says anything. The others 
must be restored by analogy with longer, fuller ballads, — 
say " Guenillon." Here three cavaliers pass by the wood; 
the oldest cries, " I see a girl," the next, " She sleeps," but 
the youngest, "She shall be my love," — each in a stanza 
interlaced with the next, and with refrain and constant 
incremental repetition. Some ballads, of course, refuse 
to be cut; what would "Babylon" be without the two 
sisters, and their fate, as foil to the third ? But in the 
main it was as obvious to cut the repetitions as it was 
to insert new details; and one may thus conjecture that 
the original "Sir Henry" had little of the narrative in- 
troduction, but a great deal more spinning out of the 
situation, more of the fight, and a succession of speeches 
by the three brothers, with the same insistent and in- 
cremental repetition that one finds in the Faroe ballad, 
itself a dramatic presentation, at the dance, of a maid 
stolen by Frisian pirates. 

Cut loose from the dance, such a ballad could linger, 
like "Babylon," in the middle way of tradition, holding 
the ancient structure by reason of the central situation 
and its needs, and appealing to epic interest by tragic 



NATURAL VARIANTS 151 

complication and climax. It could fall, as we have said, 
into one of two classes; it would tend to the local and 
domestic sort, or to the general and the romantic, the 
ballad of international type. In the first case, mainly 
tragic, the story grows out of a simple dramatic situation, 
is localized, and while not necessarily "true," needs no 
alien elements to explain it. It may acquire some ro- 
mantic details in its course; but it remains a simple tale 
of love and obstacles, flight, fight, and death. This, 
at least, is the course of "Earl Brand," known also by 
Scott's version of "The Douglas Tragedy," localized 
near Yarrow banks, and by Percy's artificial "Child of 
Ell;" it is the story, found in many European ballads, 
notably in the Scandinavian "Ribold and Guldborg" 
and "Hildebrand and Hilde," and perhaps based on the 
old Hilde saga, of a girl who elopes, is intercepted by 
her father and her seven bold brethren, or simply by 
the brothers, and sees them all slain by her lover, who 
then rides home with her to his mother's bower, a mor- 
tally wounded man. In some of the Hilde versions, how- 
ever, the elopement is happily achieved; and these have 
a parallel, if not a descendant, in "Erlinton," closely 
related to "Earl Brand," where the outlaw has killed 
the fifteen knights but spared the "auld, grey-headed" 
leader, and says to his bride : — 

" 'Now ye'r my ain, I have ye win, 

And we will walk the green woods within.' " 

In ballads of this first or purely domestic class, one 
invokes no metaphysical aid; no unnatural or supernatu- 



152 THE BALLADS 

ral element intervenes. " She is an honest woman," says 
dying Earl Brand as he rides up to his mother and de- 
fends the runaway bride from a hasty charge of wanton- 
ness; "marry her to my brother." All the characters are 
fair flesh and blood ; the ballad is a piece of the wild old 
life in primitive days, and originally nothing more. To 
the simple dramatic foundation, indeed, have come epic 
features, derived from whatever immediate source, but 
common to many European versions, such as Carl Hood 
the informer, who may be Woden himself if one will, 
and the dying man's ride home. The name Brand may 
be from Hildebrand. Certain phrases of the Danish 
are repeated almost word for word in the English; though 
the latter has failed to appropriate the important climax 
of the fight where the maiden names her lover's name 
and so, by the old belief, robs him of his supernatural 
or unwonted power. But whether this main situation, 
the fact of flight, interception, and fight, repeated as it 
is by the nature of the case in every story of the kind, 
needs to be an importation from abroad or even a descent 
from older tales, is questionable. It was certainly no new 
thing. 

Supernatural forces, on the other hand, along with a 
distinctly novel and striking fact, are at work from the 
outset in ballads of the "Lady Isabel" type. "Lady 
Isabel and the Elf Knight," which has "perhaps . . . 
the widest circulation" in all balladry, and claims over 
thirty pages of Professor Child's masterly introduction, 
owes its importance to its story and its story to widely 



SUPERNATURAL VARIANTS 153 

related narrative elements. A woman, charmed by mystic 
horn or harp, by haunting echo of song, rides off to un- 
canny places, to lone nook of the forest, to Wearie's Well, 
to a "rank river," a sea, with the elfin knight, or with 
his counterpart, whom she has failed to detect, as her 
wiser sister did, and dismiss with a posing riddle. What- 
ever we do with that irrelevant bird in an English version, 
the elf is no ordinary lover, and the elopement is from 
no healthy impulse as in "Earl Brand." Birds, again, 
reveal the fate of Isabel's predecessors in sundry conti- 
nental ballads; in one case these are turned to doves, 
and coo a timely warning. The severed head of the baf- 
fled betrayer speaks, and cunningly suggests magic which 
shall restore him to life. In most of the versions the girl 
escapes; but in "Young Andrew " 1 there is a different 
tale. She asks her merely mortal lover to marry her. 
"Bring your father's gold, then," he says. This done, he 
leads her to a hill and strips her of her fine clothes, as 
in the Isabel group; she goes home only to die at the 
door, while Andrew is properly but mysteriously de- 
voured by a wolf, — maudlin tragedy, harrowing but 
alien stuff fitted awkwardly into the ballad of tradition. 
The best and oldest of the Isabel versions in English 
are very brief; only by combination of all, good and 
bad, can one make out the story as a whole. Two the- 
ories account for it. According to Professor Bugge, it is 
Judith and Holof ernes retold and retouched. Professor 
Child, with some concession to Judith, prefers "an inde- 
1 No. 48, from the Percy MS. 



154 THE BALLADS 

pendent European tradition ... of a half-human, half- 
demonic being, who possessed an irresistible power of 
decoying away young maids and was wont to kill them 
. . . but who at last found one who was more than his 
match." Modified, this story appears also in the Blue- 
beard tales. That it is a good story, whatever its origin, 
no candid reader will deny; but it is not necessary to find 
its trail in every ballad of elopement. The "Fair Flower 
of Northumberland," 1 for example, where an English 
lady frees a Scot from prison and flies with him, but is 
cruelly used and deserted on Scottish soil, needs no elfin 
explanation of the man's brutality, nor yet a source 
in the Halewijn ballads of Flanders, particularly in 
Halewijn's offer of a choice between gallows and sword. 
Both in the very small group where supernatural ele- 
ments occur, and in the large "domestic" group, the 
hero, by modern ways of thinking, is more or less brutal; 
indeed Child Waters himself, by his main treatment of 
Fair Ellen, could give points even to Bill Sykes. But 
that was the medieval way. 

A third class of these ballads, freed from all choral 
and dramatic constraint, without even a refrain, and yet 
encumbered by no supernatural elements, could tread 
a romantic path that was broad and easy and long. At 
the extreme from all the leaping and throbbing of the 
Holstein song about Sir Henry and the winning of his 
bride is the ambling gait of "King Estmere." Here is 

1 No. 9. The epic element is pronounced, but version C has ample 
traces of the choral form, and Deloney's copy (A) has its refrain. 



KING ESTMERE 155 

a gentlemanly monarch, no protagonist, who takes coun- 
sel and help of his wise brother, 1 Adler Young, and seeks 
as wife the daughter of King Adland. Together the 
brothers ride; together they woo; and the betrothal 
duly takes place, not without features which suggest Sieg- 
fried's longer courting in the "Nibelungen." Then comes 
romantic danger in the shape of a "paynim," — surely 
Percy's own word. The King of Spain intervenes; but 
by the "gramarye" of Adler Young, who returns dis- 
guised as boy to Estmere, now in the familiar lendings 
of a harper, this foul "sowdan" is ignominiously baffled, 
with all his fighting men looking helplessly on, and is 
killed out of hand. 

Ofelopement ballads which belong to the older period, 
and show - elements of romance or myth linking them 
to versions current throughout Europe, "Fair Annie" 
has been already described. "Gil Brenton" 2 has the 
same romantic interest, and the same averting of tragedy, 
in a closely allied plot; the long Scottish version, taken 
down from recitation in 1783, holds many primitive 
ballad traits, dwells on the dramatic situation, and is 
filled with incremental repetition almost from end to 

1 Will Stewart and John, no. 107, seems to be a degenerate Estmere. 
It is ridiculous in parts, for the hero takes to his bed at every rebuff; 
but it has interesting "allusions to manners and customs." The super- 
fluous " Adlatts Parke" of the first stanza can hardly be a recollection 
of King Adland's demesne; but the brothers are understudies, con- 
scious or not, of King Estmere and Adler Young; as we are told, — 

"William he is the elder brother, 
But John he is the wiser man." 

2 No. 5. 



156 THE BALLADS 

end. Refrains, too, are preserved with the majority of 
the versions. In the story, Gil Brenton brings home his 
bride, and sevenscore ships with her; but as she comes 
near the house, she weeps, and her page puts a good 
old triad of questions : — 

" ' O is there water i' your shee ? 

Or does the win' blaw in your glee ? 

" ' Or are you mourning i' your meed 
That eer you left your mither gueede ? 

" * Or are you mourning i' your tide 

That ever ye was Gil Brenton's bride.' " * 

In corresponding stanzas of repetition, she denies 
questions one and two, but admits the truth of the third. 
Willie the page — the bride appears with no name — 
tells her that Gil Brenton has sent home already seven 
king's daughters, badly damaged, because they were 
not leal maids. Frightened, for good reasons, she tries 
the expedient of Ysoude and Brangwain, substituting 
her bower- woman; but miraculously speaking blankets, 
sheets, and pillows tell Gil Brenton the truth. His angry 
mother now puts questions, and finds out from the bride 
that once she met a knight in greenwood, who left tokens 
with her, easily recognized by the auld queen as belong- 
ing to Gil Brenton. So all is well, and a son is soon 
born; and for superfluity of confirmation — 

" . . . it was well written on his breast-bane, 
1 Gil Brenton is my father's name.' " 

1 Shee = shoe; glee = glove; meed = mood; gueede = good. 



GIL BRENTON 157 

Ballads of this kind have the double value, first, of 
fidelity to the old way in their almost choral structure, 
their dramatic style, their descent by purely oral tradi- 
tion, and, secondly, of the new epic and romantic inter- 
est which they share with the Scandinavian and other 
versions. The new interest gets full justice in an absorb- 
ing story and a good climax; the old interest remains 
not only in structure and style, but in details, in the im- 
portance attached to mere changes of the situation : — 

" The auld queen she was stark and Strang; 
She gar'd the door flee aff the ban'. 

" The auld queen she was stark and steer; 
She gar'd the door lye i' the fleer." ' 

Robustious as she is, the auld queen plays a serviceable 
part here and smooths a rough path for the bride; in 
"Willie/ s Lady," close to "Gil Brenton" in form and 
derived from the same traditional source, the mother- 
in-law is evil-disposed and long prevents by her witch- 
craft the birth of Willie's son. 

From these fine ballads we pass all too rapidly down 
a steep path to the common tales of runaways fair or 
foul, most of them localized in Scotland and many of 
them dropping to very low levels of verse. One or two 
of them, however, belong to the kingdom of romance. 
Brown Robin, 2 disguised as one of his love's thirty- 

1 A similar pair of couplets in the Danish ballad Valdemar og Tove 
(Olrik, B), 37, 38, which dates from MSS. of the sixteenth century. 

2 The ballads now cited are nos. 97, 102, 103, 106, 109, 108. 



158 THE BALLADS 

three Maries, or bower-women, escapes w 7 ith her to the 
wood : — 

" O she went out in a May morning, 
In a May morning so gay; 
But she came never back again, 
Her auld father to see." 

"Willie and Earl Richard's Daughter" purports to 
account, by like love and a later elopement, for the birth 
of Robin Hood "in the gude green wood, amang the 
lily flower;" but it has nothing to do with the Robin 
Hood cycle. Rose the Red and White Lily, ill-treated 
by their stepmother, take to the woods of their own 
motion, and get into fine complications; but their forest 
is of pasteboard and the ballad has no good greenwood 
sights or sounds. Even less value attaches to "The Fa- 
mous Flower of Serving-Men," where fair Elise plays 
Cesario to a king and marries him, and to the doggerel 
"Thomas of Potte," or "Tom Potts," a real serving-man, 
who, in ninety-six stanzas, once thrilled a humble audi- 
ence, and even got a sneer from Swift, over adventures 
that end in his bridals with the daughter of Lord Arundel. 
"False to Potts I'll never be," was her word from the 
start, like Mrs. Micawber's; but it is interesting to see 
the old ballad commonplaces floundering through the 
mire of a minstrel broadside. The "little foot-page" 
must run with a letter to the lover for a tip of forty 
shillings; and the seventeenth- century serving-man's 
point of view is made even more conspicuous by the fact 
that good news in the answer raises our messenger's 



BROADSIDE DEGENERATES 159 

gratuity to a gorgeous ten pound. Another poor ballad, 
also from the Percy manuscript, "Christopher White," 
in verses equally deject, tells how the wife of a mer- 
chant, as she "sate in a deske," sent money to her old 
lover, a banished man ; he comes back in the merchant's 
absence, and proceeds to bolt not only with the wife 
but with "spoone and plate," silver and gold. The mer- 
chant is philosophical, if not emotional or even logical: — 

".All young men a warning take, 

A warning, looke, you take by me ; 
Looke that you love your old loves best, 
For in faith they are best companye." 

"George Barnwell" looms close upon us here, and 
it is a far call from "Gil Brenton" and the rest; we are 
dealing with the degenerate remnant of that journalism 
noted on an earlier page, although a very faint touch of 
tradition gives it a claim to ballad honors. As we shall 
have little to do hereafter with the broadside style, it 
may be well now to point out that it never occurs, how- 
ever humble the environment and the transmitters, in 
genuine ballads of tradition. The people to whom these 
stall-copies were recited or sung * or sold were, to be 
sure, no more ignorant or humble than the country folk 
who themselves sang and recited the simple but always 
dignified and competent verses of "Babylon" or "Gil 
Brenton;" the difference lies in the ballads, one living in 

1 Singing, however, was often a good antiseptic. Who wants to quar- 
rel with the doggerel inclinations of The Bailiffs Daughter of Isling- 
ton ? Once hear it (no. 105) sung, and one forgives the drone of the 
words. 



160 THE BALLADS 

its native tradition, another getting into the hands of min- 
strel or printer and losing all but the faintest reminiscence 
and echo of its origin. Only such reminiscence, such 
echo, or the possibility of them, justified Professor Child, 
as he expressly declares, in "suppressing disgust" and 
admitting worthless or nearly worthless ballads, — 
the worthless because it might be "a debased represent- 
ative of something genuine and better," and the others 
because something better, however little, clung to them. 1 
In the first of these classes may be ranged three inferior 
ballads 2 which deal with international love-affairs. 
Johnie Scot goes to the English court, loves the king's 
daughter, and hies back to Scotland; her disgrace is 
discovered and she is put in prison to starve. Johnie 
returns with five hundred men, fights "an Italian" 
whom the king keeps, slays him, and wins the daughter. 
Willie o' Winsbury, in like predicament, is so blind- 
ingly and blushingly blond, clad in silk and scarlet, — 

" His hair was like to threeds o' gold, 

And his skin was as white as milk," — 

that the king yields at once. "Take Janet," he says; and 
Willie, like his countryman Johnie Scot, insists that 
there shall be no dower, — a daring fiction. "Lang 
Johnny More" is a mere imitation, almost a parody, 
as Mr. Child says, of "Johnie Scot;" and is unconscion- 
ably long. 

1 See the Introduction to Young Ronald, no. 304, v, 182. Cf. The 
Knighfs Ghost, no. 265; Mr. Child says that it "has not a globule of 
old blood." 

2 Nos. 99, 100, 251. 



ELOPEMENTS 161 

A larger group of ballads * deal with local elopement 
and bride-stealing; some of these Scottish verses are 
based on fact. The best of them, "Katharine Jaffray," 
whether itself the work of Scott or compiled from tra- 
dition, was certainly the model for his "Young Loch- 
invar;" it tells of bride-stealing in two senses. A 
Scots laird snatches his former Scots sweetheart from 
his English rival on the very day of the wedding, and 
rides off with her safe from pursuit. Mr. Child notes 
that "the attitude of the young woman to her first 
lover is not distinctly brought out in several copies;" 
perhaps it did not matter. In "Lord William," — or 
"Lord Lundy, " — valuable chiefly because it comes 
from recitation, the bride is forced into marriage, but 
is rescued by her old lover. "Bonny Baby Livingston," 
in another traditional ballad, borne off to the High- 
lands for a forced marriage, gets word to her lover, 
Johny Hay, and is rescued with all the honors. Eppie 
Morrie, again, is the Scottish Brunhild; though carried 
to a castle and left with her would-be husband, she 
defends herself stoutly until morning, when the Lowland 
lover brings her help. Even more intrepid is the un- 
named heroine of a late but jolly little piece, "Walter 
Lesly," with an effective refrain; tied on horseback and 
taken to an alehouse on the way to "Conland," she 
slips off while Walter indulges in a very intempestive 
nap. 

1 Printed by Child in his fourth volume. The numbers are from 
221 on, and need not be further noted. — Walter Lesly is no. 296. 



162 THE BALLADS 

" Then over moss and over muir sae cleverly she ran, 
And over hill and over dale, without stockings or shoon; 
The men pursued her full fast, wT mony shout and cry, 
Says, * Will ye go to Conland, the winter-time to lye ? ' 

"'I'd rather be in Duffus land, dragging at the ware, 
Before I was wi' Lesly, for a' his yellow hair, 
For a' his yellow hair, and sae well's he can it tye; 
I'll go no more to Conland, this winter-time to lye.'" 

Another heroine, in "Broughty Wa's," swims her way 
to freedom. There can be no doubt that these random 
ballads were often "founded on fact;" the case is clear 
for a fragment called "The Lady of Arngosk." Isobell 
Dow, in 1823, remembered this bit of song and the facts 
that gave rise to it; the rest of the verses she had for- 
gotten. Her own mother was waiting-maid, about 1736, 
to the Lady of Arngosk, a Miss Margaret Gibb, and 
often told the daughter how Mr. Graham, a Highlander, 
carried off mistress and maid to Braco Castle, and se- 
cured them in an upper room till morning, when Mr. 
Jamieson, the favored lover, appeared with hue and cry 
and forced Graham to surrender his prisoners unharmed. 
Whereupon, of course, the countryside rang with a bal- 
lad, which C. K. Sharpe, the well-known collector, had 
heard in his youth, but of which he could remember 
only one stanza. Helped a trifle more by Isobell Dow, 
whose memory also failed her, Sharpe, in 1823, could 
print only these opening verses : — 

" The Highlandmen hae a' come down, 
They've a' come down almost, 
They've stowen away the bonny lass, 
The Lady of Arngosk. 



ELOPEMENTS 163 

" They bae put on her petticoat, 
Likewise her silken gown; 
The Highland man he drew his sword, 
Said, 'Follow me ye's come.' 

"Behind her back they've tied her hands, 

And then they set her on; 

* I winna gang wi' you,' she said, 

'Nor ony Highland loon.' " 

So local history found its way into ballads. 

But the lady in the case did not always fare so well, 
as the ballad of "Rob Roy" can testify. 1 Jean Key, a 
widow of two months, was carried off by Rob Oig, 
younger son of Scott's hero, and forcibly married to him, 
dying within a year, while the MacGregor himself was 
tried and executed for his crime. Less tragic is " John o' 
Hazelgreen," where Scott found the refrain of his song; 
a gentleman abducts a girl who is moaning for John, 
and rides off with her, despite her tears, only to take her 
to his own house and be welcomed by his own son, — 
who turns out to be John of Hazelgreen. 

There are ballads, again, where the lass is willing, 
but the parents are opposed. Duncan Grahame, a High- 
lander, persuades Bonny Lizie Bailie to marry him, — 

"And she's up to Gillecrankie 
To go among the heather. 

"And she's cast off her high-heel'd shoes 
And put on a pair of laigh ones, 
And she's away with Duncan Grahame 
To go among the brachans." 

1 See Scott's Introduction to his Rob Roy. The date of the occur- 
rence was 1750. 



164 THE BALLADS 

Lizie Lindsay flies from Edinburgh with a young fel- 
low who says his father is an old shepherd, takes her 
through rough ways till she wishes herself home, and 
finally reveals himself as Sir Donald. Glasgow Peggie 
goes through the same experiences to find herself 
Countess of Skye. 1 In these ballads, disordered though 
they seem to be, and favorites as they were in the 
stalls, there are glimpses of the old choral beginnings. 
One comes now and again on the trail of really dramatic 
versions, but does not find them; although it is known 
that ballads like "Andrew Lammie" were actually pre- 
sented as a kind of rural play. Dugald Quin, 2 who courts 
Lizzie Menzies, wins her despite her father, and turns 
out to be a well-conditioned man, — the Old Lady's 
Manuscript notes that he was Marquis of Huntly, — 
carries on his wooing in a jolly dialogue full of repetition 
and lilt of the dance; there is hardly narrative enough 
for a ballad, comments Professor Child, and it is all the 
nearer to choral song. There is the same lilt, the same 
lively dialogue, in "The Beggar Laddie," as well as in 
"The Duke of Gordon's Daughter;" this young person 
elopes with her captain, who falls heir, in the nick of 
time, to an earldom. Young Peggy runs away in unex- 
citing style; but Lady Elspat is intercepted in her flight 
and the lover is haled before a justice who turns out to 
be his uncle: all, in fact, ends well except the ballad, 

1 Different uses of this well-worn motive are found in The Broom 
of the Cowdenknowes and in The Jolly Beggar. 

2 No. 294. 



ELOPEMENTS 165 

which, as Mr. Child remarks, is "not impressive." In 

"Glenlogie," where, again, the ancient structure is well 

maintained, an impetuous girl falls in love with a man 

already engaged, and her parents will do nothing; but 

the good chaplain, in a travesty of the relative-climax, 

writes so eloquently to Glenlogie that the laird yields at 

once : — 

" 'Cheer up, bonnie Jeannie, ye are flow'r o' them a'; 

I have laid my love on you, altho I was promised awaV " 

Reminiscent of " Tom Potts " in subject but not in 
manner are two ballads which tell how a lady elopes with 
her inferior: "Richie Story," founded on fact, where 
repetition and refrain partly cloak poor stuff, and "The 
Kitchie Boy," a very bad reminder of "Hind Horn." 1 

So much, barring a brace of quite negligible attempts, 
for the ballads of bride-stealing and elopement. At their 
best they echo the new call of romance with the old voice 
and phrase of tradition ; at their worst they are neverthe- 
less fairly representative of their times, reflecting the life 
of rural and isolated Scottish communities, even if Willie 
of Douglas Dale, 2 who made a wife of his highborn sweet- 
heart, took her to the wood as day dawned "and lions 
gaed to their dens ! " This glimpse of perilous and fearsome 
adventure, however, was not all. Tradition laid hold of a 
theme well known in European tales, and sang in two 
sterling ballads 3 the trials and triumph of lovers who 

1 Compare Lady Diamond, no. 269, a poor echo of Boccaccio's 
Guiscardo and Ghismonda, with the lover a " kitchen-boy." 

2 No. 101. 

3 Nos. 25, 96. 



166 , THE BALLADS 

baffle the opposition of kinsfolk, outwit the vigilance of 
brothers and parents, and meet happily at last. "Willie's 
Lyke-Wake," an old, two-line, traditional ballad, with 
refrain and constant repetition, tells how the hero feigns 
death, and his love comes to the wake. The corresponding 
Swedish version, immensely popular, is "often repre- 
sented as a drama by young people in country-places." 
The other of our ballads reverses the roles of man and 
maid. In the " Gay Goshawk," a bird brings an English 
girl her Scottish lover's letter to the effect that he cannot 
wait her love longer. " Bid him bake his bridal bread and 
brew his bridal ale, "she answers, " and I '11 meethim." She 
goes to her father and asks one boon : " if I die, bury me in 
Scotland." She takes a " sleepy draught," — the device is 
familiar in romance, — seems dead, and is carried, as she 
directed in the usual incremental stanzas, repeated at the 
fulfillment of them, from kirk to kirk, until her lover meets 
her on safe ground. The seven brothers, amazed at cherry 
cheeks and ruby lips, are sent home "to sound the horn," 
outwitted by one more clever lass in the long epic series. 

II. BALLADS OF KINSHIP 

The mention of sister and brothers carries us to the 
large group of ballads that deal with complications of 
household and kin. Tragedy hovers over these, and, as 
in the case of their highborn rivals from the Oresteia to 
"Hamlet," seldom fails to fall upon them. Doggerel itself 
cannot hide in them the dignity of tragic passion; but 
when that old simplicity of repetition is allowed to do the 



BEWICK AND GRAHAM 167 

work alone, to carry the hopeless struggle of personality 
against fate, and when the traditional note is untroubled, 
then the ballad achieves those results which make the 
critic claim it as art. We may, for the first of these cases, 
regret the contamination of broadside style, but we can- 
not help admiring the genuine pathos of a "Bewick and 
Graham" in the dilemma where choice halts between two 
duties, both of them sacred yet mutually destructive, the 
flaming sword over each path, and no God to intervene. 
We know how a Greek chorus swells the agony of this 
choice, and how soliloquy after soliloquy of Hamlet, 
speech after speech of Rodrigue, rebel against it; our 
ballad, already far gone in broadside ways, can still 
sustain the old note in however deplorable style. Bewick 
and Graham 1 are two young men living near Carlisle 
who have "sworn brotherhood," perhaps, as Scott says, 
"the very latest allusion" to this ancient rite; but their 
fathers quarrel over the wine, and old Graham goes 
home half drunk and whole angry to tell his son that 
there must be a fight to the finish for the brothers-in- 
arms. Most significant is the difference in style between 
the original dialogue, which carries the two main situa- 
tions as well as the preliminary quarrel, and the doggerel 
minstrel verse which completes and fills out the "story." 
Force, dignity, delicacy, little marred in the transfer to a 
stall-copy, are set over against helplessness of expression 
and dragging verse. Take the part where Graham tells 
his son that the fight must be fought. 

1 No. 211. Contrast stanza 7 with the dialogue quoted ! 



168 THE BALLADS 

" ' Oh, pray forbear, my father dear ; 
That ever such a thing should be ! 
Shall I venture my body in field to fight 
With a man that 's faith and troth to me?' 

" ' What 's that thou sayst, thou limmer loon ? 
Or how dare thou stand to speak to me? 
If thou do not end this quarrel soon, 
Here is my glove, thou shalt fight me.' 

" Christy stoop'd low unto the ground, 

Unto the ground, as you '11 understand ! 
'O father, put on your glove again, 

The wind hath blown it from your hand.' 

"' What 's that thou sayst, thou limmer loon? 
Or how dare thou stand to speak to me? 
If thou do not end this quarrel soon, 
Here is my hand, thou shalt fight me.' 

" Christy Grahame is to his chamber gone, 
And for to study, as well might be, 
Whether to fight with his father dear, 
Or with his bully Bewick he. 

" * If it be my fortune my bully to kill, 
As you shall boldly understand, 
In every town that I ride through, 

They '11 say, There rides a brotherless man! 

" * Nay, for to kill my bully dear, 
I think it will be a deadly sin; 
And for to kill my father dear, 

The blessing of heaven I ne'er shall win. 

" * O give me my blessing, father,' he said, 
' And pray well for me for to thrive ; 
If it be my fortune my bully to kill, 
I swear I'll neer come home alive.' " 



BEWICK AND GRAHAM 169 

Protesting their love, the young men fight; Graham 
wounds Bewick mortally, but, true to his vow, falls on 
his own sword and dies. Bewick is still living when his 
father comes up : — 

" * Arise, arise, O son,' he said, 

'For I see thou 's won the victory.' 
1 Father, could ye not drunk your wine at home, 
And letten me and my brother be?' " 

With a request to dig a grave wide and deep, and to bury 
them both in it, — "but bury my bully 1 Grahame on the 
sun-side, for I'm sure he's won the victory," — young 
Bewick has done, and the real ballad ends ; although five 
stanzas are added to tell of the contrition of the two 
fathers. It is sterling stuff; "infectious" Mr. Child w r ell 
calls it. 

Nearly every family relation is involved in these 
canticles of love and woe which come from the very heart 
of traditional song; and they pass by obvious transition 
into the other group, also tragic in the main, of stolen or 
lawless love. But even here is no tragedy of what we now 
call romance; it is not a private grief, given in a kind of 
confidence to the reader; it is the tale of love and death 
as a community would voice it, square to the facts and 
going not a handbreadth beyond them. Even in the 
ballads of lovers, interest lies outside, as it were, of their 
private fate. While it cannot be said of balladry, as a 
recent writer has said of early Greek dramatic literature, 
that there is "perfect freedom from those pairs of lovers 
1 Billy, comrade. 



170 THE BALLADS 

who have been our tyrants since modern drama began," 

it is true that ballad-lovers are free from our curse of 

sentiment. There is approach to it in a Scottish ballad 

already cited as a favorite for dramatic presentation 

among the Aberdeenshire folk; this piece may now be 

described as a story where unequal station, the united 

opposition of the maid's immediate kin, and more homely 

but effective blows of fate, bring love to a swift and tragic 

end. "Andrew Lammie" * is in the modern conven-J 

tional style, but it has touches of the old way. A recurring 

stanza : — 

" Love pines away, love dwines away, 
Love, love decays the body; 
For love o' thee, oh, I must die: 
Adieu my bonnie Annie ! " — 

ought to be artificial, but does not so affect us. The 
figure of the trumpeter, Andrew, blowing his last fare- 
well — "I come, my bonnie Annie " — from the tower 
of Fy vie castle to the mill of Tif tie where Annie lies beaten 
to death by the blows of father, mother, and brother, 
is a picture that is helped neither by similar scenes in 
modern sentimental literature nor by the portrayal of it 
in an actual image of the lover, set up on one of the cas- 
tle turrets; still, it is pathetic enough and "justifies the 

1 No. 233. In no. 239, another tragic ballad, Jeanie is forced by her 
parents to marry Lord Saltoun, though she loves Auchanachie Gor- 
don. Brought home from the wedding, she dies just as Gordon returns 
and asks to see her : — 

" He kissed her cold lips, which were colder than stone, 
And he died in the chamber that Jeanie died in." 



EDWARD 171 

remarkable popularity which the ballad has enjoyed 
in the north of Scotland." 

Sentiment of this kind, however, has no part in the old 
breed of ballads which tell the tragedy of kin. The naked 
rock is covered by no vines of comment or suggestion ; it 
is all hard fact, mainly brought out by a dialogue and in 
a dramatic situation. Some of these ballads are too 
familiar to describe. The false wife and wicked mother 
is revealed only by the very last line of "Edward," dia- 
logue throughout : — 

" ' Sic counseils ye gave to me.' " 

"Edward," which the latest editor of the "Minstrelsy" 
calls a "doctored" ballad, with its hint to Heinrich Heine 
for one of the finest verses in the "Two Grenadiers," 
with its slow, strong movement, its effective repetition, its 
alternating refrain of simple vocatives, may be "doc- 
tored ;" but would that its physician could be found! 

After all, it is rather the cruel wife of which "Edward" 
tells than the cruel mother; but a traditional ballad 1 
of the old two-line pattern with a refrain, and related to 
certain Danish versions, justifies its title. The young 
mother kills and buries her babe or babes, and goes 
back to her father's hall as leal maiden, only to see chil- 
dren playing there, who reproach her with her crime : — 

" * O cursed mother, heaven's high, 

And that 's where thou will ne'er win nigh. 

" ' O cursed mother, hell is deep, 

And there thou '11 enter step by step.' " 

1 The, Cruel Mother, no. 20. 



172 THE BALLADS 

Another cruel mother, who also has a brief chance to 
play the cruel mother-in-law, gives poison to her son 
because he marries against her will. 1 Cruelty in these 
cases, however, was felt to be the sin against nature; and 
ballads, though by no means so frequently in our English 
versions as elsewhere, turn for material to the stepmother 
and to the mother-in-law. A German scholar and his- 
torian of ancient things, Professor Schrader, has recently 
written a little monograph 2 on the mother-in-law which 
deserves to be widely known. Referring to the hackneyed 
stories, allusions, jokes, of modern days, Schrader fol- 
lows the tradition through popular and classic literature 
back to its source in the evolution of the family. The 
fundamental fact is the relation of the husband's mother 
to his young wife; what can be and has been a helpful, 
pleasant alliance, appears at certain stages of culture, par- 
ticularly represented by the Russian and even the modern 
Greek ballads, as unimagined woe. The worst stories 
come directly from life, and ballad or tale simply follows 
fact, — a hint for the too eager discoverer of a literary 
origin for every narrative in verse. A few English pieces 
reflect, however faintly, these Greek and Russian hor- 
rors; but in no case does one find old tragedy warmed 
over and served as a proper new jest. Often the man's 
mother, however suspicious of the bride, gladly takes 

1 Prince Robert, no. 87. 

2 Die Schwiegermutter und der Hagestolz, Braunschweig, 1904. 
For a few cases of the bad mother-in-law in continental ballads, see 
Professor Child's account of the "Testament" formula, i, 143 f. 



THE MOTHER-IN-LAW 173 

charge of his child, as in "Earl Brand" and in the 
mawkish "White Fisher;" in the finest version of "Fair 
Janet," Willie goes with the new : born babe to his mother 
and is bidden to return and comfort his "fair lady," 
while the "young son" shall have nurses three. In "Gil 
Brenton" we saw the mother-in-law jealous of her son's 
rights, but helpful to disentangle a bad knot and prevent 
tragedy. In "Willie's Lady," however, a two-line piece 
from Scottish tradition, our hose Schwiegermutter stands 
out plain enough, working, by foul magic, to prevent the 
son's wife from bringing forth her child; the Billie Blin, 
"a serviceable household demon," who appears in three 
other Scottish ballads, reveals the remedy for this witch- 
craft. It may be said that the shadow of that aversion felt 
by the man's mother for his wife is a kind of compensa- 
tion for the close relation of mother and son. Matriarchy 
in the background or not, the ballads give vast preference 
to the maternal as compared with the paternal relation. 
It is a justified suspicion of her son's sweetheart which 
makes the mother put those swift and throbbing queries in 
"Lord Randal." Mother, wife, and brother give the last 
consolations to Clerk Colvill; no father appears, and a 
tendency to neglect that important personage may be re- 
marked in the ballads throughout. Advice comes chiefly 
from the mother, as one notes in the best version of " Lord 
Thomas and Fair Annet;" the addition of the father in 
some other versions is perfunctory; while in "Edward," 
the part of Orestes is reversed. Tradition, to be sure, 
would always set the matter right, if facts permitted, and 



174 THE BALLADS 

the nearest way was to make the mother and her counsels 
as odious as might be. The hard-hearted mother-in-law 
personates her son, and ruthlessly turns his true-love from 
Gregory's door, in a familiar and pretty ballad known in 
several versions and by different titles, — "The Lass of 
Roch Royal." Poor Isabel, or Annie, goes baffled to her 
death, and Love Gregory wakes : — 

" ' O wo be to you, ill woman, 

And ane ill death mott you die ! 
For you might have come to my bedside, 
And then have wakened me.' " 

The same complication, only that the mother's pains and 
benefits here concern her daughter and baffle the lover, 
has wandered into a tragic ballad, "The Mother's Mali- 
son, or Clyde Water." In fact, both motives appear. The 
man's mother begs him not to tempt his fate. Like the 
mother of Johnie Cock, who, however, spares malison 
and only expresses fears, Willie's mother offers him in 
incremental stanzas, with corresponding stanzas for his 
rejections, the best bed in the house, the best hen on 
the roost, and then, since he will not bide, the curse of 
drowning in Clyde. His appeal to the river, as Mr. Child 
points out, has a classical parallel : — 

" ' O spair me, Claid's water, 
Spare me as I gaa ! 
Make me yer wrak as I come back, 
But spare me as I gaa !' " 

The girl finds him drowned in the stream, and says that 

the two mothers will be sorry: — 

" * For we 's bath slipe soun in Clide's water.' " 



THE FILIAL RELATION 175 

To match the close relation of mother and son, we get 
a glimpse of the daughter who can dare everything for 
love of her sire. In a vigorous old ballad, 1 which has a 
parallel tradition to support its facts, but fails to maintain 
them in the light of history, Sir John Butler's hall is laid 
about and taken by his "Uncle Stanley" and other merry 
men. Ellen, the daughter, comes down "laced in pall," 
faces the invaders, and, splendide mendax, declares that 
her father is abroad. In vain. A faithful retainer makes 
a desperate stand at Butler's room : — 

" Ffaire him ffall, litle Holcrofft ! 
Soe merrilye he kept the dore, 
Till that his head firom his shoulders 
Came tumbling down upon the ffloore." 

Tangled as this story seems to be, truth lies somewhere 
behind it; the devoted daughter and the faithful servant 
— contemporary, almost, with that Paston family whose 
letters tell so much of domestic relations in the fifteenth 
century — are no fable, whatever their exact date and 
place. 

The figure of the stepmother flits very dimly across the 
ballad, She gets short shrift in "The Laily Worm." She 
appears in "Rose the Red and White Lily," wicked of 
course, but subordinate and baffled; "Lady Isabel," 2 
however, who this time has no elf-knight, but a lover 
beyond the sea and a weak father at home, is bidden by 
her angry and abusive stepmother to drink poisoned 
wine. She asks first to go to Marykirk, where she sees 

1 Sir John Butler, no. 165, from the Percy MS. 2 No. 261. 



176 THE BALLADS 

her own mother sitting in a golden chair. " Shall I fly, 
mother, or drink ? " — "Drink," is the answer; "your bed 
is made in a better place than ever hers will be." Isabel 
drinks and dies; the stepmother goes mad "in the fields." 
Fickle husbands and false wives play no great part. In 
the group of comparatively modern ballads, a certain 
Earl of Aboyne, 1 who is courteous and kind to every 
woman, nevertheless has the fault that "he stays ouer 
lang in London." At last he comes; his lady marshals 
all the grooms, minstrels, cooks, chambermaids, a stanza 
for each degree; stately she steps to meet him: "Wel- 
come, thrice welcome from London." "Kiss me," says 
the earl lightly; "for the morn should hae been my bonny 
wedding-day had I stayed the night in London!" — "Go 
kiss your ladies in London! " answers the offended wife. 
— "An unworthy welcome," cries he; "men, we'll go 
back." She begs to be taken with him, but in vain; 
lives a scant year, and dies of broken heart. The earl 
absurdly enough puts fifteen lords in black, and weeps 
up to the very gates of Aboyne. Another wife, the Lady 
of Leys, 2 is more medieval in her point of view; when 
she learns of the baron's escapade, — 

" That the laird he had a bairn, 
The warst word she said to that was 
T wish I had it in my arms,' " 

1 No. 235. Version J removes the absurdities by making Peggy Ir- 
vine his truelove, to whom he is pledged, and not his wife. In no. 240, 
The Rantin Laddie, an Earl of Aboyne fathers the bairn of a sweet- 
heart and brings her home in due form. 

2 The Baron o Leys, no. 241. 



BALLADS OF JEALOUSY 177 

offering to sell her jointure-lands and so release her 
"rantin laddie" from his alternative of death or ten thou- 
sand crowns. A foolish husband is Earl Crawford, 1 whose 
ballad is based on facts that happened in the sixteenth 
century and was traditionally recited or sung late in the 
nineteenth. Lady Crawford, a trifle jealous of her lord's 
devotion to their child, jests about its paternity; and the 
angry man sends her home. She dies of a broken heart 
just as Crawford has determined to take her back. There 
is no death in the ballad of "Jamie Douglas," 2 but there is 
a very sad wife, who speaks throughout in the first person, 
takes into the ballad some stanzas of the fine song of 
" Waly, Waly," and blames Lockwood, a retainer of the 
Marquis, for bringing about their separation. This sepa- 
ration is historical fact, and took place in 1681. Another 
Douglas ballad exists only in a single stanza: — 

"The Countesse of Douglas, out of her boure she came, 
And loudly there that she did call: 
It is for the Lord of Liddesdale 
That I let all these teares downe fall," — 

but this more serious case of marital troubles seems not 
to be true. 

With the actual breach of marriage vows, balladry has 
little concern. There is a small group of serious ballads 
which belong here, two of them excellent; and these are 
matched by a single but successful humorous ballad well 
known in many lands. "Our Goodman" 3 comes unex- 
pectedly home and sees a horse at the door. 

1 No. 229. 2 No. 204. 3 No. 274. 



178 THE BALLADS 

" * What's this now, good wife, 
What's this I see? 
How came this horse here 
Without the leave o' me?' 
'A horse?' quo she. — 'Ay, a horse,' quo he. 
' Shame fa' your cuckold face, 

111 mat ye see ! 
'T is naething but a broad sow 
My minnie sent to me.' 
'A broad sow?' quo he. — 'Ay, a sow,* quo she. — 
4 Far hae I ridden, 

And farer hae I gane, 
. But a sadle on a sow's back 

I never saw nane.'" 

All the rest is incremental repetition on the frame of these 

stanzas, — jack-boots are explained as water-stoups, 

sword as porridge-spurtle, or stirring-stick, and so on to 

a climax which the hearer can continue as he pleases. It 

has been noted above * that this ballad, a situation full 

of repetition and capable of unlimited insertions, is sung 

in several parts of France "as a little drama." In rare 

cases, it has a serious ending; but that is against the 

spirit of the piece, and we need not be alarmed at the 

threat : — 

" Je t'y menerai z'en Flandre 
Et puis t'y ferai pendre ..." 

which the woman parries with "Keep that terrible fate 
for French robbers!" 2 

1 See p. 103, and Child, v, 90. 

2 Two young girls " play" this ballad, one made up as angry shepherd, 
the other as timid shepherdess, singing it from house to house, accom- 
panied by the young folk of the village. — Puymaigre, Chants Popu- 
lates, 1865, pp. 215 ff. 



BALLADS OF ADULTERY 179 

Serious enough are the other English ballads which 
deal with this theme. "Child Owlet" and the "Queen 
of Scotland," 1 one tragic, the other not, are negligible; 
but "The Bonny Birdy," with its "admirably effective" 
refrain, where an ill-treated bird reveals to a husband the 
treachery of his wife, and two ballads from the Percy Folio, 
"Old Robin of Portingale " and "Little Musgrave and 
Lady Barnard," 2 deserve the highest praise. The story, 
naturally enough, is the same in both of these pieces, but 
they differ in details. Old Robin, after he has slain, with 
surprising agility for his years, not only Sir Gyles the 
lover, but four and twenty of Gyles's "next cousins," 
knights, who came to help ding the husband down, and 
has then cruelly, but by good right, mutilated the offend- 
ing bride, is seized with generous remorse, laments in con- 
ventional but effective stanzas his violence to a woman 
and his slaughter of a good knight, burns the cross into 
his own flesh, — "shope the cross in his right sholder, of 
the white flesh and the red," — and fares on a crusade. 

" God let never soe old a man 
Marry soe yonge a wife ..." 

is the opening word of the ballad, which reminds one 
here of Heine's "Es war ein alter Konig." Lord Barnard, 
however, in the companion piece, is not said to be old, 
and his lady was not married against her will; she is pure 
wanton. Barnard's wild ride for vengeance, and the song 
of warning when his horn blew, — "Away, Musgrave, 
away ! " — half heard and understood by the lover, un- 
1 Nos. 291, 301. 2 Nos. 82, 80, 81. 



180 THE BALLADS 

heard by the lady, are as effective as may be, and were 
popular long ago. Percy noted the quotations from this 
ballad by Beaumont and Fletcher. 1 Passions jostled each 
other rudely in the old time. Barnard rides for ven- 
geance, but will not "kill a naked man," and of his two 
swords gives Musgrave the better ; wounded at the first 
stroke, a conventional situation, he slays his man at the 
second. Lady Barnard will pray for Musgrave's soul, she 
says defiantly, " but not for thee, Barnard ! " He cuts her 
cruelly in the old act of mutilation "for adultery, and her 
heart's blood runs trickling down. TJien, as with Robin 
of Portingale, the sudden repentance: — 

"'Woe worth me, woe worth, my mery men all, 
You were neer borne for my good; 
Why did you not offer to stay my hand 
When you see me wox so wood ? 2 

" ' For I have slaine the bravest sir knight, 
That euer rode on steed; 
So have I done the fairest lady 
That ever did woman's deed/ " 3 

1 Knight of the Burning Pestle, v, 3 ; Bonduca, v, 2 ; Monsieur 
Thomas, iv, 11. 

2 Wood = mad. 

3 B, the Percy MS. version, has the better reading: — 

" That ever wore woman's weed," — 
and adds an interesting line : — 

" So have I done a heathen child," — 

that is, an unbaptized, unchristened child. — A very curious marital 
complication, not the sort, one would think, for ballads or any other 
literature, is recorded in the Earl of Errol, no. 231, a saucy, dashing 
ballad on the Earl's part. 



CHILD MAURICE 181 

It will be noted that "Child Maurice" ends somewhat 
in this way and with such an imprecation. But " Child 
Maurice" is not a simple tale of lawless love and revenge; 
like "Babylon," it belongs to the tales of mistake and 
tragic "recognition." The wife is at least true to her 
vows; the supposed lover whom she was to meet in the 
Silver Wood, and whose message was overheard by the 
husband, is her son; and the swift, unexpected climax 
of discovery and death is a far better foil for these words 
of despair from the husband. He has tossed Child 
Maurice's head to her: "lap it soft and kiss it oft, for thou 
lovedst him better than me!" And she: " I never had 
child but one, and you have slaine him." Not only is 
the husband's outburst better phrased: — 

" Sayes, ' Wicked be my merrymen all, 
I gave meate, drinke, and clothe ! 
But cold they not have holden me 
When I was in all that wrath ! 

" * For I have slain one of the curtiousest knights 
That ever bestrode a stede, 
So have I done one of the fairest ladyes 
That ever ware woman's weede,' " — 

but it is thus that we know of her breaking heart and 
death. No wonder that Gray, as sensitive a critic, as 
scholarly a poet, as ever lived, almost lost his balance over 
a version of this ballad, and wrote in words that cannot 
be quoted too often: "It is divine. . . . Aristotle's best 
rules are observed in it in a manner which shews that the 
author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth 



182 THE BALLADS 

act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through with- 
out guessing what it is about; and yet, when you come to 
the end, it is impossible not to understand the whole 
story." 1 

Supernatural complications in the crime against wed- 
lock will be noted in "James Harris," one of that small 
group of ballads which deals with the other world. 2 True 
wives and leal maidens also find words of commendation. 
Brown Adam, 3 the outlaw, comes back from greenwood 
to find his wife sturdily but despairingly resisting not only 
a gallant's purse of gold, but a drawn sword; and Brown 

Adam has 

"... gard him leave his bow, his bow, 

He 's gard him leave his bran'; 

He 's gard him leave a better pledge, 

Four fingers o' his right han'." 

A poor ballad, "Redesdale and Wise William," is inter- 
esting not only for the " Cymbeline " motive, a wager 
between two men about a woman's virtue, but because 
in this case it is Wise William's sister, not his wife, whose 
chastity is put to proof. Redesdale loses his lands and 
goes over sea. Brother and sister, it would seem, are an 
older combination for these instances of close confidence 
and affection than husband and wife or lover and sweet- 
heart; and it has been suggested 4 that the various tales 

1 Gray to Mason, Works, ed. Gosse, ii, 316. The " play " is Home's 
Douglas. 

2 See below, p. 216. 

3 No. 98. 

4 By the late Gaston Paris, as reported by one of his students. The 
present writer has sketched the case for the sister's son in a paper of that 



THE SISTER'S SON 183 

should be so ordered in their final chronology. The bal- 
lads have preserved some remarkable traces of the pre- 
cedence of a sister's son over a man's own son, a condition 
which was noted by Tacitus among the ancient Germans, 
and is the subject of considerable comment by ethnologists 
who find it still surviving among barbarous nations 
and savage tribes. There is no English ballad, however, 
which brings out this whole complex of relationship so 
well as the Danish "Nilus og Hillelille," reminding one 
not only of the scene in the old " Waltharius," where Hagen 
refuses to fight his brother-in-arms until the latter kills 
Hagen 's own sister's son, but also of the vague tradition 
that on the Danish throne itself it was the custom for the 
king to be succeeded not by his own issue, but by his 
sister's son. Sir Nilus marries Hillelille the fair; riding 
homeward with his bridal train, which includes his two 
sister's sons, they are overtaken on the heath by wind and 
rain and cold. Nilus would take shelter with his bride's 
mother's brother, Sir Peter, but there is feud between 
them. Nilus has killed Sir Peter's brother. "I will re- 
concile you," says the bride. They ride to Peter's house; 
and Peter reproaches his niece for her marriage. He had 
a better match for her; moreover, — Sir Nilus knows 
whom he has slain ! The bride goes to her room; the men 
drink mead and w T ine. Peter goes out and brings in his 
brother's sword, throwing it down on the table: "You 
know you killed him?" Nevertheless, Nilus shall go in 

title in An English Miscellany , the Furnivall Memorial Volume, Oxford, 
1901. 



184 THE BALLADS 

peace and all his men, "save only thy two sister's sons!" 
These are ready to fight. Sir Nilus looks on and at last 
sees them felled dead to the earth. In spite of a pious vow, 
Nilus draws his sword and plays the man, getting at last 
a mortal wound. "Come, Hillelille; it is time to ride!" 
They ride home; his sister meets him, and asks for her 
two sons. "Be a mother to my wife," cries the dying 
man, after he has told the fate of his dearest kin. But the 
sister cannot do that. "How can I be fain with her who 
has made me lose my two sons and my brother?" Nilus 
dies in his sister's arms; and the bride falls dead of grief. 
The grouping of relatives here is extraordinarily inter- 
esting; brother and sister, the sister's sons, the mother's 
brother — such are the nearest and dearest of kin. No 
one English ballad shows this concentration; but the 
cumulative details of a score of ballads come to the same 
thing. The substitution of wife for sister is evident, along 
with some well-worn details, in Buchan's contribution 
from the north of Scotland, "The Twa Knights." 1 

On the whole, ballad ideals of true wifehood, while 
including loyalty to the marriage vows in a narrower 
sense, would undoubtedly make it cover more positive 
virtues. We may remember that our old epic, the Beo- 
wulf, sets up two types of womanhood, or of queenhood, 
one very good and one very bad; if we sought for a 
similar pair in the ballads, we could find the good wife 
and mother sharply outlined in the heroine of the ballad 
of "Captain Car," an English version of which is practi- 

1 No. 268. 



CAPTAIN CAR 185 

cally contemporary with the event that it narrates, — the 
burning, in 1571, of a castle not far from Aberdeen, along 
with the mistress and twenty-seven inmates; while the 
more shadowy figure of the bad wife is revealed in the 
"Baron of Brackley." * Even those fierce times could 
not away with the brutality of Car, or, as some versions 
have it, of Adam Gordon; and the answer of the Lady 
Hamilton, who, it seems, should be a Forbes, awoke an 
admiring response in the ballad world. Leaning on her 
castle wall, she sees a troop coming, and thinks it to be 
her "wed lord," but it turns out to be traitor Captain Car. 
" Give over thy house, thou lady gay," he bids; and adds 
insult to the demand. 

" ' I will not give over my hous,' she saithe, 
* Not for f eare of my lyffe ; 
It shall be talked throughout the land, 2 
The slaughter of a wyffe.' " 

She fires shots that miss Car but kill "other three." 

Hard pressed, she demands safety for her eldest son; the 

captain bids her let the boy down in a sheet, and assures 

a good reception. This is done; he cuts out the child's 

tongue and heart, and casts them over the wall to the 

mother. Owing to a traitor within her castle, the place is 

now fired. 

" But then bespake the little child, 
That sate on the nurses knee; 
Saies, 'Mother deere, give ore this house, 
For the smoke it smoothers me." 

1 Nos. 178, 203. 

2 See similar phrase below, p. 210, from a widow. 






186 THE BALLADS 

" ' I would give all my gold, my childe, 
So would I doe all my fee, 
For one blast of the westerne wind 
To blow the smoke from thee.' " 1 

But there is no thought of surrender and dishonor; she 
dies with her children; and she was indeed "talked 
throughout the land," a wife such as wives should be. 
Types are generally taken from folk in high place. A 
lowlier but vivid ideal of wifehood is in "Adam Bell;" 
w r hile the wife of Geordie, who saves that hero from the 
very block, by offering all she holds dear, 2 mills, uncles, 
her own children, is at least of gentle blood. But in the 
"Baron of Brackley," a ballad fairly Homeric for simpli- 
city, 3 for the effective use of name and place, and more 
than Homeric in its intense clannish sentiment, there is 
another kind of wife. Barring the question of dates, and 
the probable confusion of two Brackleys, one killed by a 
Farquharson, in 1666, another — very likely the husband 
of our heroine — in 1592, there is no doubt of the type and 
reputation of the wife as portrayed by the ballad. Inverey 
with his caterans comes down Deeside "whistlin' and 
playin'," knocks at Brackley's gates, and demands his 
blood. The baron naturally hesitates to go out. His lady 
taunts him with cowardice; and he summons his fighting 
kin for a hopeless struggle. 

" At the head o the Etnach the battel began, 
At little Auchoilyie thei killd the first man. 

1 Text of the Percy MS. 

2 In B, no. 209. 

3 Professor Child is surely not quite just to its qualities in bracketing 
it with The Fire of Frendraught (196) as "fairly good." 



THE BARON OF BRACKLEY 187 

" First they killed ane, and soon they killed twa, 
Thei killed gallant Brackley, the flour o them a'. 

" Thei killd William Gordon and James o the Knock, 1 
And brave Alexander, the flour o' Glenmuick. 

" What sichin and moaning was heard i the glen, 
For the Baronne o Braikley, who basely was slayn ! 

" * Cam ye bi the castell, and was ye in there ? 
Saw ye pretty Peggy tearing her hair?' 

" * Yes, I cam by Braikley, and I gaed in there, 
And there saw his ladie braiding her hair. 

" ' She was rantin, and dancin, and singin for joy, 
And vowin that nicht she would feest Inverey. 

" * She eat wi him, drank wi him, welcomd him in, 
Was kind to the man that had slayn her baronne.' 

"Up spake the son on the nourice's knee, 
'Gin I live to be a man, revenged I'll be.' 

"Ther's dool i the kitchin and mirth i the ha', 
The Baronne o Braikley is dead and awa'." 

Such are the ballad's typical wives, good and bad, 2 
drawn by the hand of tradition on a background of actual 
experience. We turn again to the tragedy of kin, and 
those ballads which derive not so much from actual per- 
sons and events as from the general store of human pas- 
sions and the general experience of fate. "The Cruel 
Brother," already noted, is "one of the most popular of 

1 Text: "Knox." 

2 See, also, the Three Ravens, and Bonny Bee Horn, below, p. 198, 
for constancy. 



188 THE BALLADS 

Scottish ballads," according to Aytoun the most popular; 
it holds to the primitive form and has a varying stock of 
refrains. A knight, or "gentleman," chooses and wins 
the youngest of three sisters: — 

" One o' them was clad in red: 
He asked if she wad be his bride. 

"One o' them was clad in green: 
He asked if she wad be his queen. 

" The last o' them was clad in white: 
He asked if she wad be his heart's delight." 

This is strongly suggestive of the old partner verses in 
genuine ballads of the dance; and it is followed by similar 
repetitions which express the "asking-permission" for- 
mula, also choral in its source. Our wooer asks all the 
bride's kin for consent, forgetting only her brother John. 
The tragedy has slipped from its old levels, where a 
brother was really his sister's keeper and found a hus- 
band for her as Sir Peter had vainly done in the Danish 
ballad cited on a preceding page; here is mere ferocity of 
resentment for a slight, when, on the wedding-day, John 
sets the bride upon her horse for the ride to church, and 
stabs her to the heart. She makes the usual legacies, in- 
teresting in this case for the glimpse of a bad sister-in-law 
who may have inspired brother John's crime. 

" O what will you leave to your father dear ? 
'The silver-shod steed that brought me here.' 

" What will you leave to your mother dear ? 
'My velvet pall and my silken gear.' 



BROTHER AND SISTER 189 

" What will you leave to your sister Anne ? 
'My silken scarf and my gowden fan.' 

" What will you leave to your sister Grace? 
'My bloody cloaths to wash and dress.' 

" What will you leave to your brother John ? 
'The gallows-tree to hang him on.' 

" What will you leave to your brother John's wife ? 
'The wilderness to end her life.' " 

As in the Danish ballad quoted above, brother and sister 
represent a relation of ancient sanctity, and there are 
traces of the brother's almost paternal position. Another 
brother, in "Lady Maisry," bids his sister give up her 
lover across the border, or be burned alive ; seven brothers 
avenge a like stolen love in "Clerk Saunders;" while in 
a far poorer piece, Earl Rothes betrays a young lad's 
sister, and the boy swears that when he is grown he will 
thrust his sword through the betrayer's body. 1 Not only 
slighted authority is in play; there is the modern motive 
of rivalry. Spread over the British Isles, not even now 
quite extinct as tradition, and popular to the point of 
parody, "The Twa Sisters" 2 is a good match for "The 
Cruel Brother," is equally primitive in form and as rich 
in the old repetition. Best known in the version of the 
"Minstrelsy," with a refrain "Binnorie, O Binnorie," 
this ballad is palpably compounded of the dramatic 
"relative" situation with epic and romantic elements 
which may be reduced to the idea that a dead girl's lover, 
or else a great harper, strings his harp with three locks 
1 See nos. 65, 69, 297. 2 No. 10. 



190 THE BALLADS 

of her yellow hair with strange results in the playing. 
The younger of two sisters, chosen as usual by the 
wooing knight, who, however, has also courted the elder 
with sundry gifts, is pushed into the water by her rival 
and is drowned. The miller finds her body in his dam, 
and wonders; but the harper, who comes by, strings his 
harp with her hair and plays to the king at dine: — 

" The first tune he did play and sing, 
Was, * Farewell to my father, the king.' 

" The nextin tune that he playd syne, 
Was, ' Farewell to my mother, the queen.' 

"The lasten tune that he playd then, 
Was 'Wae to my sister, fair l Ellen.' " 

Here the harp, with its farewell, represents the usual 
conclusion in a series of legacies. So, in the ballad noticed 
twice before, when accident or jealousy brings two 
brothers to blows, and then, with fatal conclusion, to for- 
giveness and love, the affecting messages for home take 
the place of the legacy formula. More complicated, and 
of course without this legacy conclusion, is the rivalry of 
two brothers in the best versions of "Lord Ingram and 
Chiel Wyat," 2 — in one case they are uncle and nephew, 
— where both lay their hearts on one lady. Ingram courts 
her openly, and gets consent of kin; Wyat has secretly 
gained her love. The wedding is set; she sends the usual 
bonny boy with a message to Wyat; and immediately 
after the marriage tells her unwelcome husband that she 
1 C reads "false." 2 No. 66. 



THE BRAES O YARROW 191 

had warned him in every detail. He will father the bairn, 
he says; she refuses with contempt. Then up starts Chiel 
Wyat, out of space it would seem; and the brothers kill 
each other. Lady Maisry goes mad. 

Still another form of brotherly vengeance, like Ham- 
let's, spares the woman and seeks out the man. A brother 
could love well as Wise William did, and he could hate 
well, — if not, as just now, the sister, then the sister's 
spouse. Here is another brother John, who harbors nobler 
ideas of vengeance for a sister's ill-placed love. 

" 'O true-love mine, 1 stay still and dine, 
As ye ha' done before, O ! ' 
'O I'll be hame by hours nine, 
And frae the braes of Yarrow.' 

" * O are ye going to hawke,' she says, 
* As ye ha done before, O ? 
Or are ye going to weild your brand 
Upon the braes of Yarrow?' 

" ' O I am not going to hawke,' he says, 
'As I have done before, O. 
But for to meet your brother Jhon 
Upon the braes of Yarrow.' " 

An unequal fight, a blow from men at his back, and the 
lover or husband is "sleeping sound on Yarrow," whither 
the lady goes to find him, and to die, Landscape and bal- 
lad hold together; it is superfluous to dwell on the charm 
of these haunting lines, which, in nearly all versions, keep 

1 The Braes o Yarrow, no. 214, A. In all versions "the family of the 
woman are at variance with the man." In group A-I hero and heroine 
are married; in J-P lovers (Child). 



192 THE BALLADS 

the melodious name of the river sounding from verse to 
verse, and are echoed by the masters of English poetry. 1 
A tragic complication of kinship which literature is 
wont to avoid, but which was not unknown in wilder 
times, is the lawless love of brother and sister. The mere 
possibility of it gives superfluous horror to the tragedy of 
"Babylon." In "Sheath and Knife," in "Lizie Wan," 2 
the relation is known and nakedly horrible; in "The 
Bonny Hind" and "The King's Dochter Lady Jean," 3 
it is ignorance on the man's part and ignorance as well 
as helplessness on the woman's part. Despite their sub- 
ject, all these ballads are of the old and sincere kind, 
particularly "Sheath and Knife." Mother and child die 
in the forest; Willie comes back forlorn to his father's 
court, where are minstrels and music and dancing: — 

"'O Willie, O Willie, what makes thee in pain?' 
{The brume blooms bonnie and says it is fair.) 
'1 have lost a sheath and knife that I'll never see again.' 
{And we 'U never gang doun to the broom onie mair.)" 

Lizie Wan confesses to her father and is killed by the 
brother, Geordie; in remorse he tells his mother what he 
has done, and will sail in a bottomless boat, coming back 

1 No. 215, Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow, pretty enough, but little 
more than a lament of a girl for her lover, with no story, has more details 
when transferred in other versions from Yarrow to the "waters of 
Gamry." 

2 Nos. 16, 51. The assumption that 51, Lizie Wan, and 52, The 
King's Dochter, are the same ballad, asserted positively by Mr. Hender- 
son in his edition of the Minstrelsy, iii, 376, seems unnecessary in view 
of this vital difference between ignorance and knowledge. 

3 Nos. 50, 52. 



THE FALSE SERVANT 193 

when "the sun and the moon shall dance on the green." 
In "The Bonny Hind," Lord Randal's daughter asks her 
sudden lover who he is; he is Jock Randal, come o'er the 
sea; and she kills herself at once. Lady Jean, king's 
daughter, has the same experience, the same fate, — but 
this ballad, while traditional, is not well told. 1 

Complications of the family might also follow the 
treachery of a servant. Most audacious, and most tragic 
in its results, is the faithlessness of the churl servant in 
"Glasgerion," 2 or, as the Scottish traditional version has 
it, "Glenkindie." The hero, who may be, along with 
Chaucer's Glascurion, a historical Welsh bard, is the 
harper who can harp ladies mad; and a king's daughter 
bids him to her bower. He tells his boy, Jacke, who pro- 
mises to waken him in time for the tryst; but the servant 
forestalls his master. " Have you left bracelet or glove ?" 
asks the lady, when Glasgerion arrives. He swears by 
oak and ash and thorn, a fine old heathen oath, he had 
never been in her chamber. " No churl's blood shall 
spring in me," she says, and draws her knife. Glasgerion 

1 Leesome Brand, no. 15, should be named in connection with births 
in the forest. Tristram, however, or the false Robin Hood, is less likely 
to result than the babe or babes that are slain either purposely or by 
neglect. The frankness of the ballads about this matter is only matched 
by their convention of necessary absence on the part of the man, even 
if death be caused by his absence when no one else can help. Note also a 
remarkable ballad, which tells of a maid who marries, full of foreboding, 
after five of her six sisters have died in childbirth. Her own fears come 
true. See Fair Mary of Wallington, no. 91. There is a corresponding 
Breton ballad. 

2 No. 67, from the Percv MS. 



194 THE BALLADS 

goes home a woe man. " Come hither, thou Jacke, my 
boy; if I had killed a man to-night, I would tell thee; 
but if I have not killed a man to-night, Jacke, thou hast 
killed three!" 

Not so poignant, so swift and grim, are the other bal- 
lads of trust betrayed by servants. In "Captain Car" we 
saw that a steward, or the like, betrayed his lady and "kin- 
dled in the fire." Also subordinate to the main story is 
the treachery of the nurse in "Lamkin," * where the lady 
of the house and her child are likewise done to death, but 
here by one man, the mason, who has built the castle, has 
had no pay for it, and in the lord's absence takes fiendish 
revenge. An old Kentish version of this ballad, which is 
mainly from Scotland, and very widespread there, ends 
in a cumulative relative-list 2 which can be indefinitely 
drawn out: Lady Betty is bidden to come down and see 
her mother's heart's blood run; down she comes and begs 
to die for her mother; but again the call sounds, this time 
for Lady Nelly to come and see her sister's blood, then 
Lady Jenny, and so on. The Scottish versions, however, 
simply make the nurse, a false limmer, let Lamkin in at 
a little shot-window while men and women of the castle 
are away. Lamkin kills the baby, and so brings down its 
mother, who is killed despite her appeal for mercy. The 
rhythm of most of the versions — Child prints twenty- 
six — is peculiar: — 

" * O still my bairn, nourice, 
O still him wi' the wand !' 

1 No. 93. 2 See p.. 103, above. 



LAMKIN 195 

*He winna still, lady, 

For a' his father's land.' 
'O still my bairn, nourice, 

O still him wi' the bell!' 
'He winna still, lady, 

Till ye come down yourself " l 

More epic than "Lamkin," which is of the older "situa- 
tion" type of ballad, is "Fause Foodrage;" 2 here the 
faithless retainer slays his king, but lets the queen live 
till she bears her child. If it prove a lass, it shall be well 
nursed; a lad-bairn must die at once. The queen, 
escaping from her guards, bears a boy; but exchanges it 
with the baby girl of Wise William and wife. Whert he 
grows up, the lad kills the usurper and marries Wise 
William's lass. The style is not good; king and queen 
need not be taken seriously. In "Sir Aldingar," 3 how- 
ever, already mentioned as the probable theme in one 
of William of Malmesbury's anecdotes, we have an old 
widespread tale, with trial by combat, and with variations 
of incident which can be traced to the stores of romance. 

1 The nursery, where this ballad, so full of repetition and so insistent 
in tune, was most at home, varied Lamkin's name. One Northumber- 
land nurse sang: — 

" Said my lord to his ladye, 

As he mounted his horse (bis) 
Take care of Long Lankyn 

That lies in the moss, (bis) 
Said my lord to his ladye, 

As he rode away, 
Take care of Long Lankyn 

Who lies in the clay." 

He was Longkyn, Lammikin, Balcanqual, and so on. 

2 No. 89. 

3 No. 59. See above, p. 53. 



196 THE BALLADS 

It is told in the straightforward ballad way, and is at the 

other extreme from the story by allusion and suggestion, 

— say "Count Gismond," where Browning gives a 

glimpse of the same material. Sir Aldingar, false steward, 

would have seduced our comely queen; but "our queen 

she was a good woman, and evermore said him nay." 

He puts a leper into the queen's bed; "a loathsome 

cripple, " says Harry King, " for our dame Queen Elinor." 

Accused, she remembers her dream; a griffin has stript 

her of crown and kirtle, and would have borne her away 

to its nest, but for "a little hawk flying out of the east," 

which strikes down the griffin. Forty days are given the 

queen to find a champion, else she is to be burned. A 

messenger rides south, in vain; the second, riding far 

east, speeds better, finding "a little child," who sends 

word to the queen that when bale is highest boot is nighest, 

and that her dream — repeated in detail — will come 

true. It does; and Aldingar, mortally wounded by the 

child, confesses all: "thy wife, King Harry, — 

" Thy wiffe she is as true to thee 

As stone that lies on the castle wall." 

The "lazar," made whole, is steward in Aldingar's stead. 
This is from the Percy Folio. Another version, "Sir Hugh 
le Blond," with a steward called Rodingham, comes from 
the recitation of an old woman in Scotland. A poor 
ballad, "James Hatley," ! makes Sir Fenwick, aged 
thirty-three, steal the king's jewels and lay the blame on 
Hatley, who is but fifteen. The youth gives Fenwick three 

1 No. 244. 



THE FALSE STEWARD 197 

wounds, forces confession, and marries the king's daugh- 
ter, who has got for him this favor of trial by battle. An 
ambitious false steward to the Lord of Lorn 1 is sent with 
his master's only son, a youth of prodigious learning, on 
the grand tour, beginning with France, and undertakes to 
drown the heir; he has a kind of mercy on the boy, how- 
ever, strips him of his finery, clothes him in leather, and 
makes him take another name and tend sheep. The 
recognition comes, after tedious stanzas, at the French 
court; the ballad derives very superfluously from a ro- 
mance. There are, of course, other ballad persons who 
betray their trust of service or hospitality; and for the 
most part they get a good curse for their pains. That old 
palmer who tells the foresters of Johnie Cock, old Carl 
Hood in "Earl Brand," the old wife in "Adam Bell," 
and the imitated "Auld Matrons" in her own ballad, 2 — 
it is not clear why all informers should be old, — match 
the "great-headed monk" who betrays Robin Hood to 
the sheriff of Nottingham. 

The truelove also can be false or fickle, — and still a 
truelove; the adjective having lost in most cases its quali- 
fying force. True love at its best, stronger than death, 
is beautifully sung in the ballad of "The Three Ravens," 3 
which is unfortunately not so well known as its cynical 
pendant, "The Twa Corbies." Instead of hawk and 
hound and lady fair, all false to the new-slain knight, — 

" Down in yonder greene field 
There lies a knight slain under his shield. 

1 No. 271, from Percy MS. 2 No. 249. 3 No. 26. 



198 THE BALLADS 

" His hounds they lie downe at his feete, 
So well they can their master keepe. 

" His haukes they flie so eagerly 
There's no fowle dare him come nie." 

His love comes, kisses his wounds, and carries him to the 

shroud: — 

" She buried him before the prime, 
She was dead herself ere even-song time." l 

Another true truelove is the lady of "Bonny Bee Horn," 
whose fidelity is better brought out by the widow's song 2 
which the ballad partly repeats: — 

" There shall neither coif come on my head, nor comb come in my hair; 
There shall neither coal nor candle-light come in my bower mair; 
Nor will I love another one until the day I die, 
For I never lov'd a love but one, and he's drowned in the sea." 

The lover was not expected to show such devotion 
after his sweetheart's death, nor was he always a model 
of constancy before; but in this case he could often look 
for swift revenge. Young Hunting and Clerk Colvill, in 
their fine ballads, 3 desert first loves at the cost of life 
itself. The clerk belongs with the supernatural class; 
but Young Hunting gets his death at a mortal woman's 
hands. " Rock your young son never an hour longer for 

1 That thief in Heine's poem is the real counterpart to our knight: 
*■ Hanged he was at six in the morning, and buried by seven; " but the 
sweetheart, tender and true, — 

11 Sie aber, schon um Achte, 
Trank rothen Wein, und lachte! " 

2 Lowlands of Holland, see no. 92, and Child's note. — The Widow 
of Ephesus is too cynical for traditional ballads. 

3 Nos. 68 and 42; see, also, 86 and 12. 



TRUELOVES AND OTHERS 199 

me," l he says, in no gentle fashion; "I have found an- 
other love, and the very soles of her feet are whiter than 
thy face." She coaxes him to bide a while, plies him with 
the good ale and the beer, plies him with the good ale 
and the wine, and stabs him with the inevitable "little 
penknife." A bird bids her keep her clothes from the 
blood; reminded of the witness, she tries to lure the 
bird and kill it, but in vain. She boots and spurs Young 
Hunting, and throws him into the wan water of Clyde, 
" a green turf upon his breast" to hold him down. The 
king misses his son; the lady swears incrementally, "by 
the corn," that she has not seen him since yesterday 
morning, and " by the moon " that yesterday noon was her 
last sight of him. Probably he was drowned in Clyde. 
Divers dive for him to no purpose; but the bird comes in 
now, tells how to find the body by the candle test, and 
reveals the murder. Desperate, the lady accuses another 
woman; but the trial by fire clears May Catheren and 
burns the guilty one to death. The tables are turned in 
"Young Benjie," who is told by his Marjorie that she 
would choose another love. He persuades her to walk 
with him by wan moonlight, and throws her into the linn. 
During the lykewake the dead woman tells her brothers 
of the murder, and prescribes Young Benjie's punish- 
ment. Spare his life, but blind him; "and ay, at every 
seven year's end, ye '11 take him to the linn for penance." 
Jellon Grame, 2 for no apparent reason, — in another 

1 Brutal betrayal and desertion, unrelieved by romance, is very rare; 
see Trooper and Maid, a late and negligible ballad, no. 299. 

2 No. 90. 



200 THE BALLADS 

version he is called Hind Henry, and is jealous of Brown 
Robin, — slays his sweetheart in the mysterious Silver 
Wood, but spares the child she bears him, bringing it up 
as his "sister's son." On a day, Jellon Grame somewhat 
absurdly confesses, and the boy kills him. Young 
Johnstone stabs his bride, and repents too late; his 
motive is not clear. Two Scottish ballads, "The Duke 
of Athole's Nurse" and "Sir James the Rose," 1 tell of 
revenge by a slighted leman. The beautiful ballad of 
"Lord Randal" does not say what motive the sweetheart 
had to poison him; she may have feared desertion, or she 
may have tired of him. The fickle lover certainly plays 
his part in three fine ballads, "Lord Lovel," "Lord 
Thomas and Fair Annet," "Fair Margaret and Sweet 
William," 2 — the latter being provided with that rare 
character of English balladry, a ghost, — and in some 
indifferent local ballads, like "The Coble of Cargill," 
"Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick," "Lord Thomas and 
Lady Margaret," 3 where the injured woman respectively 
"bores" her love's boat and sinks him on his visit to an- 
other mistress, puts a curse and death on him, and poisons 
him, a vagrant and wretched outcast, at her door. "Lord 
Lovel" every one knows; 4 every one should know how 
Lord Thomas quarrels with Fair Annet, and, by advice 
of mother and brother, marries the nut-brown bride with 

1 Nos. 212, 213. 

2 Nos. 75, 73, 74. 

3 Nos. 242, 257, 260. 

4 For the rose and briar which grow from the tombs of the lovers and 
unite in a true-lover's knot, see Child, i, 96. 



FICKLE LOVERS 201 

her gold and gear, and how at church the jealous bride 

stabs the old love, and Lord Thomas then kills the bride 

and himself. A stanza of "Fair Margaret and Sweet 

William, " where Margaret's "grimly ghost" comes into 

the bridal chamber, is quoted in "The Knight of the 

Burning Pestle," as well as William's word: — 

" " You are no love for me, Margaret, 
I am no love for you.' " 

"Bonny Barbara Allan" is double fickleness, tragic 
where Robert Henryson's old pastoral of "Robyn and 
Makyn" and Burns's "Duncan Gray" take a lighter 
view of the same situation. "Lady Alice" is a pretty 
little echo of Barbara, and still, says Mr. Child, "in 
the regular stock of the stalls." "The Brown Girl," 
printed near the end of the collection, 1 while not an old 
or traditional ballad, is a lively summing-up of the whole 
case for this rejected brunette. Brown as brown can be, 
her eyes black as sloe, she is cast off by a fastidious love 
simply because she is "so brown." In half a year he is 
love-sick indeed, sends first for "the doctor-man" and 
then for the brown girl " who once his wife should be." 
Come to his bedside, she can scarce stand for laughing, 
but strokes him back his troth, 2 and promises "to dance 
and sing 9 ' — not weep — on his grave "a whole twelve- 
month and a day." 

In another group of ballads, most of them purely tradi- 
tional, it is not fickle or false lover, not quarrel, not the 

1 No. 295. 

2 Taken from Sweet William's Ghost, no. 77; so the next from The 
Unquiet Grave, no. 78. 



202 THE BALLADS 

cooling of affection, but the hand of fate, that brings 
dule and sorrow out of stolen love. "The Bent Sae 
Brown" * ends well, but should not do so. "Fair Janet," 
however, "Lady Maisry," "Clerk Saunders," "Willie 
and Lady Maisry," and the "Clerk's Twa Sons " 2 have 
tragedy and to spare. Janet bears her babe; but Sweet 
Willie has hardly carried it off to his mother's bower, 
when her father comes and bids her dress for her wedding 
to an auld French lord. Janet puts on the scarlet robes, 
and rides the milk-white steed to her marriage; but will 
not dance with her auld French lord after dinner. Sweet 
Willie comes along to dance with the bride's maidens. 
Then Janet speaks: — 

"'I've seen ither days wi' you, Willie, 
And so has mony mae, 
Ye would hae danced wi' me mysel, 
Let a' my maidens gae.' " 

But thrice she turns in the dance, when she falls at Willie's 

feet never to rise again. He sends home the key of his 

coffer: — 

" ' Gae hame and tell my mother dear 
My horse he has me slain; 
Bid her be kind to my young son, 
For father he has nane.' " 

Lady Maisry's English lover is far away when she refuses 
to give him up, and her brother condemns her to the fire. 
The effective conclusion has been quoted already. 3 When 
the seven brothers surprise Clerk Saunders and May 
Margaret asleep, six are for sparing him. " Lovers dear," 

1 No. 71. 2 Nos. 64, 65, 69, 70, 72. 8 Above, p. 122. 



LOVE AND WOE 203 

says one in excuse; "this many a year," says the second, 
and "sin to part them," the third; "or to kill a sleeping 
man," the fourth; "I'll not twin them," cries the fifth, 
and the sixth is for all hands going softly away. But the 
seventh stands by his grim idea of duty to kin and name, 
and runs his sword through the lover. "Willie and Lady 
Maisry are in the same plight, but the deed is done by 
her father. In the "Clerk's Twa Sons of Owsenford," 
two youths, abroad for learning, die in Paris, by pro- 
cess of law, as penalty for stolen love; their father tries 
in vain to save them, and comes home to tell his dis- 
tracted wife that he has "put them to deeper lore." 

To be sure, balladry knows that stolen love is sweet, 
and romances know that a happy ending of it is most 
desired. A far and faint echo of the old daybreak song of 
Provence may be heard in "The Gray Cock," 1 — a mod- 
ern affair. Careless lovers now make amends, now jest off 
the matter, in what Mr. Child calls "pernicious" ballads, 
however popular, like "The Broom o' Cowdenknowes " 
and "The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie." 2 Better 
is "The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter," suggestive 
of the Wife of Bath's tale. 

One of the pearls of English balladry, by judgment of 
such lovers of the ballad as Child and Grundtvig, belongs 
to a little group where a peremptory and half -heartless, if 
free-handed, lover puts his devoted sweetheart to a series 
of ignoble tests in order to get rid of her. True, in a dra- 
matic poem like "The Nut-Brown Maid," these tests are 

1 No. 248. 2 Nos. 217, 290. See, also, no. 110. 



204 THE BALLADS 

hypothetical and meant only to try feminine love and 
devotion to the uttermost; and in the Patient Griselda 
stories, actual trials lead to the same triumph of woman's 
constancy. It has been suggested that the man in this lat- 
ter case is under a spell, and can be released only by the 
almost supernatural endurance of his wife. In "Child 
Waters," however, the tests are real enough, and the mo- 
tive is surely what it seems to be, — the wish of a wealthy 
and careless lover to rid himself of an encumbrance. 
Something else may shimmer in the epic background; 
but in the ballad there are simply a loving and long- 
suffering woman, a man harsh to the verge of brutality, 
and circumstances which in their climax of trial make 
the ballad's closest friends cry out with pain. 1 The best 
version makes the hero send poor Ellen to the town to fetch, 
and actually to carry, a woman for his pleasure; in "The 
Nut-Brown Maid" an equally revolting rivalry is pro- 
posed; in an understudy in low life of "The Nut-Brown 
Maid " (called "A Jigge," Percy Folio, ii, 334) Margaret 
proffers a like service to her soldier. How and where, then, 
is one to find characteristics which so far outweigh these 
defects as to gain from the two great masters of balladry 
unqualified praise? "Child Waters" "has perhaps no 
superior in English, and if not in English, perhaps no- 
where." 2 Grundtvig gives a reason. In no ballads is 

1 It has been noted that the Erec of Chrestien de Troyes shows a 
much more consistent and likely type of woman's constancy. But the 
ordinary medieval reader and hearer liked a stronger dose of endurance; 
and Chaucer's Griselda falls into line with the main procession. 

2 Child, ii, 84. 



CHILD WATERS 205 

there such richness of feeling, of lyric expression, as in 
the English; and "Child Waters," he says, shows this 
supreme quality in all its versions. We have already 
quoted exquisite stanzas from its opening; but there is 
even finer and nobler matter left. Other ballads tell a 
story of women who follow an unwilling lover and force 
his hard heart to take pity on them. Not to speak of con- 
tinental ballads, with which we have here no concern, 
"Prince Heathen," * fragment as it is, points that way, 
although in very corrupted shape. In "The Fause Lover 
Won Back," 2 a maid, sitting in her bower-door, sees 
Young John hurry by. " You seem bent on a long jour- 
ney," she says; "Whither away?" With "a surly look" 
he tells her that is not her concern: "I'm ga'en to seek a 
maid far fairer than ye." After an interpolated stanza or 
so, she kilts up her fine clothing and goes after him. Then 
the choral stanza comes in by way of answer to his com- 
mand that she turn back, and continues in alternation 
with some helpless but progressive incremental verse: — 

" 'But again, dear love, and again, dear love, 
Will ye never love me again? 
Alas for loving you sae well, 
And you nae me again ! ' 

"The first an town that they came till, 
He bought her brooch and ring; 
And aye he bade her turn again 
And gang nae furder wi him." 

Seeing the effect of her stanza, she very properly repeats it 

and gets this time at the next town "muff and gloves," 

1 No. 104. 2 No. 218. 



206 THE BALLADS 

while he again, but more feebly, bids her go back "and 
choose some other loves." A third time the stanza, and at 
the third town "his heart it grew more fain," though his 
agitation permitted of no purchases. The last town, pre- 
sumably, is Berwick, where he buys her a wedding-gown 
and makes her lady of halls and bowsers. 1 So much for the 
vagrom song. Its increments and repetitions are matched 
in " Child Waters; " but all hint of the trivial is gone from 
this noble ballad, however unsophisticated the style. The 
unmeaning increment, even, is here, 2 but it is carried by 
the dignity and force of the situation : — 

" There were four and twenty ladyes, 
Were playing att the ball; 
And Ellen, was the ffairest ladye, 
Must bring his steed to the stall. 

"There were four and twenty faire ladyes 
Was playing at the chesse; 
And Ellen, she was the ffairest ladye, 
Must bring his horse to grasse." 

And exitus acta probat. Nothing could be more dignified 
and pathetic than the close. Theman's mother,here again 
serviceable and yet authoritative, as in "Gil Brenton," 
hears Ellen groaning by the manger side. "Rise up," she 
says to her son; "I think thou art a cursed man, for 
yonder is either a ghost or a woman in her pangs." And 
Child Waters goes to the stable and listens to Ellen, who 
sings : — 

1 Version B, from a woman's recitation, ends more prettily. 

2 As well as the tremendously effective increment: see above, p. 133. 



CORONACHS 207 

" Lullaby e, my owne deere child ! 
Lullabye. deere child, deere ! 
I wold thy father were a king, 
Thy mother layd on a beere ! " 

The "tests" are done, if one will; rather it is the caMous 
hero who cannot resist this final appeal. " Peace, good, fair 
Ellen," he says, and the adjectives are a kind of apology; 
" bridal and churching shall be on one day." ■ 

III. THE COROXACH AXD BALLADS OF TliE SUPERXATURAL 

Ballads of superstition, as modern arrogance chooses 
to call them, are as rare in English as they are abundant 
in Scandinavian collections. Nevertheless, the quality of 
the English and Scottish versions in this class is often 
supremely good. The dead man was mourned in song; 
his fate was followed into the other world; and when he 
returned to visit the glimpses of our moon, he rarely 
failed to be impressive. Originally, he was doubtless 
mourned by solemn dance as well as song, and the 
coronach seems to point to such origins, however ancient 
and remote we are fain to suppose them on Scottish and 
English soil. 2 Unfortunately, there is no ballad of the 
parting soul, only that very effective "Lykewake Dirge," 
which Aubrey reported as sung at rustic funerals, early in 

1 Dr. Furnivall makes no allowance for the Child, and reviles his 
" cursedness " utterly: see Hales and Furnivall, Percy Folio, ii, 27S. 

2 The actual dance at funerals — like the caracolu of Corsica, noted 
above, p. 95 — seems, however, to have been common in modern Scot- 
land: see Pennant's Tour, 1774, p. 99. "The nearest of kin," he says, 
"opens a melancholy ball, dancing and greeting" — weeping; and this 
goes on all night. Here are both caracolu and vocero. 



208 THE BALLADS 

the seventeenth century, by a woman like a praefica. 
"When any dieth," says an old account of it, " certaine 
women sing a song to the dead bodie, recyting the journey 
that the partye deceased must goe." The refrain, or 
chorus, is very insistent and plainly of popular origin. 
But this is not a ballad. The few ballads which seem to 
belong to the coronach order "recite the journey" which 
led to death, but not the way beyond. Every one knows 
the pretty verses of "Bessy Bell and Mary Gray." "The 
Death of Queen Jane," while it is effective enough, echoes 
rather the gossip of the people than their grief. "The 
Bonny Earl of Murray" has been already quoted. 1 
"Young Waters," 2 too, though not "the queen's love," is 
suspected by the king; and a glimpse of the vocero or 
lament may possibly be found in his good-night words: — 

" * Aft I have ridden thro Stirling town 
In the wind bot and the weit ; 
Bot I neir rade thro Stirling town 
WT fetters at my feet. 

" * Aft I have ridden thro Stirling town, 
In the wind bot and the rain; 
Bot I neir rade thro Stirling town 
Neir to return again/ " 

A genuine bit of vocero is surely imbedded in the frag- 
ments of "Bonnie James Campbell," 3 when the widow 
sings : — 

1 See pp. 95 f . 

2 Dr. W. W. Comfort has pointed out the resemblance of the motive 
in this ballad — the queen, by calling Young Waters fairest of all the 
company, excites the wrath and vengeance of the king — to a passage 
in Charlemagne's Journey to Jerusalem. 

3 No. 210. 



CORONACHS 209 

"'My meadow lies green, 

And my corn is unshorn, 
My barn is to build, 

And my babe is unborn.' " 

Another widow is more heroic and, while less melodious 
in her lyric, far more picturesque and definite. The laird 
of Mellerstain * was slain in feud; a fragmentary ballad 
from the Abbotsford texts hears "a lady lamenting sair." 

'"Cowdenknows, 2 had ye nae lack? 

And Earlstoun, had ye nae shame? 
Ye took him away behind my back, 
But ye never saw to bring him hame.' " 

She looks about her to see the body brought back: — 

"And she has lookit to Fieldiesha, 
So has she through Yirdandstane; 
She lookit to Earlstoun, and she saw the Fans, 
But he's coming hame by West Gordon." 

She sees at last the corpse. " How can I keep my wits 
when I look on my husband's blood?" Then for a 
strong close: — 

"'Had we been men as we are women, 

And been at his back when he was slain, 
It should a been tauld for mony a long year 
The slaughter o' the laird of Mellerstain.' " 

1 No. 230. The murder took place in 1603. 

2 A place is still used in Scotland to denote not only its laird, but its 
inhabitants as a body. "Ettrick has been here," or "Teviotdale," said 
the borderer coming back to a plundered home and noting the "signs." 
Compare the Bible phrase, " Reuben had great searchings of heart," 
— for the tribe. The names of places are very effective in this frag- 
ment ; compare also the final stanza with that from Captain Car, quoted 
above, p. 185. 



210 THE BALLADS 

The wider grief of the clan coronach is echoed by the 
dialogue with Willie Macintosh, 1 who, perhaps in the 
year 1550, burned Auchindown, a Gordon castle, and is 
confused in the ballad with another Willie whose clans- 
men were killed by Huntly himself: — 

" ' Bonny Willie Macintosh, 
Whare left ye your men ? ' 
'I left them in the Stapler 

But they'll never come hame.' 

"'Bonny Willie Macintosh, 
Whare now is your men?' 
'I left them in the Stapler, 
Sleeping in their sheen.' " 2 

The noblest coronach of all has made a far journey 
from its original form. Who does not think of those other 
faithful followers, the Scots lords that sleep by their 
leader, half owre to Aberdour, fifty fathom under sea ? 
The short version of Percy's "Reliques" "remains, 
poetically, the best," as Mr. Child declares, who can- 
not regard the ballad as historical; here is the heart of 
the story; and precisely such an admirable situation and 
sequel would attract all manner of additional details in 
later copies. 3 The eleven stanzas of this version, how- 
ever, need no explanation or comment; it is from those 

1 No. 183. 

2 Shoes. 

3 Thus, besides the well-known "new moon late yestreen," the fatal 
mermaiden rises "with coral and glass:" — 

11 ' Here 's a health to you, my merrie young men, 
For you never will see dry land.' " 

This apparition, without the warning, occurs in another ballad of ship- 
wreck, The Mermaid, no. 289, which is still sung. 



GOOD-NIGHTS 211 

exquisite lines already quoted, 1 where ladies of the court 
and wives of the absent lords wait in vain, and from the 
fine, impersonal conclusion, that one infers the old la- 
ment. 2 It has been noted, too, that something of this 
clan-grief is audible in the concluding stanzas of the 
"Baron of Brackley." But it is only an echo of old 
choral cries; the voice of epic and tradition drowns it 
almost to extinction. 

Like the coronach, and yet the reverse of it, is the Good- 
Night. Strictly taken, this should be the supposed last 
words of a criminal before execution, written by some 
humble pen and sold under the gallows. In balladry, 3 
however, a Good-Night tells the hero's story. This hero 
may be really condemned to death and executed, like 
Lord Derwentwater, or expecting execution, like Jock 
o' the Side in Newcastle prison, or captured in arms and 
killed without judicial process, like Johnie Armstrong, 
hanged, with his followers, "upon growing trees," or 
else may fly the country and escape trial, — for a time, — 
like Lord Maxwell, whose "Last Good Night" suggested 
the phrase and mood of Childe Harold's song. Of 

1 See above, p. 129. 

2 Some of the details in longer versions of Spens are repeated in 
Young Allan, no. 245, when forty-five ships (or any number that one 
will) went to sea, and only Young Allan comes back safe with his craft, 
saved by the skill of a "bonny boy" who takes the helm, orders feather- 
beds and canvas laid round the boat, and gets Young Allan's daughter. 
The interesting feature is that the ship obeys the boy, and at his voice 
springs as spark from fire, as leaf from tree. 

3 See nos. 208, 187, A, 169, 195. 305, a long ballad, tells how Out- 
law Murray escaped punishment and was made sheriff of Ettrick forest. 



212 THE BALLADS 

course there are farewells that approach the Good-Night, 
as that pretty stanza in which a captive far from home, 
Young Beichan or another, bewails his fate : — 

" * My hounds they all go masterless, 

My hawks they flee frae tree to tree, 
My youngest brother will heir my lands, 
My native land I'll never see.'" 

But the singer of this stanza is not under the shadow of 
death, as Maxwell is, when he flies from home and kin, 
with, — 

" ' Adieu, Lochmaben's gates so fair, 

The Langholm shank, where birks they be, 
Adieu, my lady and only joy, 

And trust me, I maunna stay with thee.' " 

Maxwell escaped for a time, but Lord Derwentwater goes 
to the block; the omens of ill, as he sets out for London 
at the king's command, the "old gray-headed man" who 
starts up "with a pole-axe in his hand," and the last 
words : — 

" * The velvet coat that I hae on, 
Ye may tak it for your fee ; 
And a' ye lords o' merry Scotland 
Be kind to my ladie ! ' " — 

these and other elements of the ballad are of the essence 
of traditional song. Peasants of Northumberland told, as 
late as a century ago, how the river ran red with blood by 
Derwentwater's hall, and the aurora, brilliant on the 
night of his execution, was long called by his name. In 
"Johnie Armstrong" the wrath of a clan is heard. 
Johnie, decoyed to Edinburgh to meet his king, is told 



GOOD-NIGHTS 213 

that the morrow he and eightscore men shall hang. 
"Asking grace of a graceless face!" he cries in a line that 
we meet again; and he is close upon smiting off the 
monarch's head. But "all Edinburgh" rises, and Arm- 
strong plays the man in vain, a "cowardly Scot" at his 
back running him through the body, while he heartens 
his men : — 

" ' . . . Fight on, my merry men all, 

I am a little hurt, but I am not slain; 
I will lay me down for to bleed a while, 

And then I'le rise and fight with you again.' " 

In another version, he speaks his Good-Night on hearing 
his doom from the king; then — 

" * God be wi' thee, Kirsty, my brither, 

Lang live thou Laird of Mangertoun ! 
Lang mayst thou live on the border-syde 
Or thou see thy brother ryde up and down. 

" * And God be wi' thee, Kirsty, my son, 
Whair thou sits on thy nurse's knee ! 
But and thou live this hundred yeir, 
Thy father's better thou 'It never be.' " 

A fine Good-Night, of course, can be made of the con- 
cluding stanzas of "Mary Hamilton," x as well as of ran- 
dom stanzas in other and inferior ballads. It is blended 
with the familiar legacy-formula. A dying man, murdered 
by exceptionally foul means, sends farewell to his wife, 
his brother, who has "a heart as black as any stone," his 
daughter and five young sons, his followers and good 
neighbors, and asks that two lairds will have his fate 
1 See below, p. 243. 



214 THE BALLADS 

always in mind as they ride the border, and revenge 
him. 1 A covenanter, 2 marching to fight, bids farewell, in 
presentiment of death, to kin and home : — 

" * Now farewell, father, and farewell, mother, 
And fare ye weel, my sisters three, 
And fare ye well, my Earlstoun, 
For thee again I'll never see.' " 

Closer to the other world than those faint funeral cries, 
than these reminiscent good-nights, are the actual relics 
of superstition. In two ballads of the sea, " Bonnie Annie " 
and "Brown Robyn's Confession," 3 "fey folk" are in the 
ship, and lots are cast to see what victim must be sacri- 
ficed. Jonah in the first case proves quite unreasonably 
to be Bonnie Annie ; it should be the captain who has 
betrayed her, and who, fairly enough, refuses to throw 
her overboard ; but at last : — 

"He has taneher in his arms twa, lo, lifted her cannie, 
He has thrown her out owre board, his ain dear Annie." 

She floats to Ireland, and he buries her in a gold coffin. 
Brown Robyn only gets his deserts, when, upon his own 
confession of monstrous crimes, his sailors tie him to a 
plank and throw him into the sea. But his "fair confes- 
sion" brings along the Blessed Virgin and her Son; she 
asks, will Robyn go back to his men, or to heaven with 
her ? He chooses and gets the second alternative. These 
pretty ballads of the sea are matched by more gruesome 

1 Death of Farcy Reed, no. 193, B. 

2 Bothwell Bridge, no. 206. 

3 Nos. 24, 57. 



FAIRY BALLADS 215 

stuff. "James Harris," or the "Daemon Lover" by 
Scott's title, would have made a fine tale, and has been 
"improved" into some elegance; its traditional guise is 
homely to a degree, being best preserved in a broadside 
formidably called "A Warning for Married Women, 
being an example of Mrs. Jane Reynolds . . . born near 
Plymouth, who, having plighted her troth to a Seaman, 
was afterwards married to a Carpenter, and at last carried 
away by a Spirit, the manner how shall presently be 
recited." Set to "a West-Country tune," this ballad tells 
how James Harris, the seaman, returns as a spirit, and 
tempts our wife away from the carpenter-husband and 
their three children : — 

"And so together away they went 
From off the English shore, 
And since that time the woman-kind 
Was never seen no more." 

The recited Scottish copies draw no such decent veil over 
the wife's fate. When she sails two leagues, in version D, 
which Child thinks the best of all, she begins to remember 
those whom she has left. The demon lover consoles : he 
will show her "where the white lilies grow on the banks 
of Italy." At three leagues, "gurly grew the sea," and 
grim his face. He will now show her where the lilies 
grow " in the bottom of the sea." 

Commerce of mortal with creatures of the other world 
is among the oldest themes in story. "Thomas Rymer," x 
one of the ballads recited by that very useful person, Mrs. 
1 The ballads which follow are nos. 37, 39, 42, 113, 40, 41. 



216 THE BALLADS 

Brown of Falkland, and also told as a romance in the 
poem "Thomas of Erceldoune," there mingled with 
prophecy and politics, is based on the tale of a man who 
is favored with a fairy's love and with an excursion to the 
fairy world. To kiss a fairy or a ghost, as we learn from 
other ballads, puts a mortal within the jurisdiction of the 
dark powers; if he eats food in fairyland, moreover, he 
will never come back to earth. In our ballad the "queen 
of Elfland " very considerately takes with her a mortal loaf 
and "claret wine" as Thomas's refreshment; for True 
Thomas must come back, and be the prophet of Tweed- 
side, after seven years in the lower world. As may be 
supposed, the theme of this ballad has almost endless 
connections with romance, tale, and myth; enough for our 
purposes that it tells simply and prettily the story of True 
Thomas's meeting with the elf-queen, whom he takes at 
first for the Holy Virgin, his kisses, the long journey in 
darkness near the roar of the sea, and talk by the way. 
In "Tarn Lin," considerably touched by Burns, another 
old theme gets ballad treatment. Janet has a tryst at 
Carterhaugh, a place where Ettrick and Yarrow join, with 
no earthly knight, but with an elfin grey. " Who are 
you ?" she asks him, against the ancient law; but Tarn is 
a mortal, carried off by the Queen of Fairies. To rescue 
him, Janet must pull him down at midnight from horse- 
back in the fairy ride. He turns to various shapes in her 
arms, esk, adder, bear, lion, red-hot iron, burning brand; 
then, as he has directed, she throws him into "well 
water," a kind of baptism, and he is once again "a naked 



PRETERNATURAL LOVERS 217 

knight." Jenny, blithe as a bird, covers him with her green 
mantle ; and the Queen of the Fairies vents her vain rage 
from a bush of broom. Less potent by title, but here more 
dangerous, is the mermaid who is beloved and then de- 
serted by Clerk Colvill, or Colvin; she has many relatives 
in European tales, and many ancestors in legend and 
myth. The Scottish ballad, another of Mrs. Brown's reci- 
tations, is effective if imperfect. The clerk promises his 
new-wed wife not to go near the Wall o' Stream and visit 
the mermaiden again. He does it, of course, and finds 
the mermaid washing a sark of silk, bides with her, and 
feels cruel pains in his head. "Cut a strip from my sark, 
and bind it about your head; you will be cured," says she; 
but he is killed. At first he seeks to slay her, but she 
changes merrily to her fish-form and disappears in the 
stream. He rides sadly back to die near mother, brother, 
and wife. The tables, however, are turned in a pretty 
little ballad * from Shetland, with an ending suggestive 
of Heine in his favorite sudden close. A woman is rocking 
her child, and sings to it that she would fain know its 
father. Up starts one who claims that honor, however 
grimly he may look. 

" * I am a man upo the Ian, 

An I am a silkie in the sea.' . . . 

" * It was na weel,' quo the maiden fair, 
'It was na weel, indeed,' quo she, 
'That the great Silkie of Sule Skerrie 

Suld hae come and aught a bairn to me.' 

1 The Great Silkie (seal) of Side Skerry, dictated in 1852 by an old 
lady of Shetland. 



218 THE BALLADS 

" Now he has taen a purse of goud, 
And he has put it upo her knee, 
Sayin, k Gie to me my little young son, 
An tak thee up thy nourris-fee. 

" ' An it sail come to pass on a simmer's day, 
When the sun shines het on evera stane, 
That I will tak my little young son, 
An teach him for to swim the faem. 

" ■ An thu sail marry a proud gunner, 

An a proud gunner I'm sure he'll be ; 
An the very first schot that ere he schoots, 
He'll schoot baith my young son and me.' " 

Finally, in a ballad which tells how closely the singing of 
it is knit in with its very being, but which is only a frag- 
ment, we have the mortal woman yearning for her mortal 
baby from the exile of Elfland, whither she has been 
taken to nurse the elf-queen's bairn. The repetitions lead 
up to the queen's promise that when the bairn stands, 
the nurse may go back home. The musical opening 
stanzas have been already quoted above. 1 "Hind Etin," 
another ballad of the union of mortal and elf, has suf- 
fered severely in tradition ; in Scandinavian versions it is 
effective enough. 

Another group 2 deals simply with transformation by 
magic and the happy solution, if such is to be. Three of 
these are alike in essential features. "Kemp Owyne," 
where incremental repetition is admirably used in the dis- 
enchanting process, tells how the kemp frees Dove Isabel 

1 See p. 35. 

2 Nos. 34, 35, 36, 270, 32, 33. 



TRANSFORMATION BALLADS 219 

from a mysterious Craigie's sea, where she lies enchanted 
into a most repulsive beast with her hair twisted about 
a tree-trunk. At each of the kisses which he gives her, 
the hair loosens by a fold, and he gets first a belt, then a 
ring, then a "royal brand," all of great virtue. She steps 
out "as fair a woman as fair could be." In "Allison 
Gross," a witch of that name turns a girl into an ugly 
worm ; but the Queen of Fairies releases her. The Laily 
Worm (or loathsome serpent) and the Machrel of the 
Sea are brother and sister, so transformed by a bad step- 
mother; the "worm" is about to kill the eighth knight 
that has come along, but it is his own father. The step- 
mother is forced to restore son and daughter to human 
shape, and then is burned to death. 1 In "The Earl of 
Mar's Daughter," this young woman sees a dove on a 
tower, calls it, and brings it to her bower; but Cow-me- 
doo turns at evening tide into a handsome youth, whom 
his mother, skilled in magic spells, thus transforms to 
pleasure himself with fair maids. She bears him children, 
whom he carries off to his mother; and she will marry 
nobody for three and twenty years, when a lord comes 
to woo her. "I'm content to live with my bird, Cow- 
me-doo." "That bird," says the father, "shall be killed." 
Cow-me-doo goes to his mother for help; she sends four 
and twenty sturdy men, disguised as storks, while the 
seven sons fly along as swans, and their father as a gay 
goshawk. They arrive in time to stop the marriage; and 

1 This ballad in the Old Lady's Manuscript is " pure tradition, and 
has never been touched by a pen." 



220 THE BALLADS 

"ancient men," who have been at weddings these sixty 
years, aver they never saw "such a curious wedding-day." 
Behind the homely phrases, however, lies a pretty tale. 
"King Henry" is a variant of the story told by the wife of 
Bath : a hideous creature begs shelter, food, and lodging 
of the king, and in the morning is revealed as a beautiful 
woman. "Kempy Kay" is mere foulness in describing a 
repulsive creature whom the kemp seeks for bride; but, 
in compensation, "The Wee Wee Man" offers a charm- 
ing study in miniature 

This is all magic, white or black; it meddles with no 
world beyond, save the vague realm of faery, and it calls 
no spirits from their haunt. Three ballads, one of them 
supremely good, deal with the spirit world and the doings 
of the parted soul: and a fourth, poorer than the usual 
poor ballad, nevertheless echoes the best-known of all 
modern ghost-poems. 1 "The Unquiet Grave," a slight 
but pretty thing, has features in common with the second 
lay of Helgi in the Norse Edda, and was taken down from 
recitation in Sussex. A youth mourns at his sweetheart's 
grave for a year; then she speaks and complains that he 
disturbs her rest. "I crave a kiss of your clay-cold lips." 
"It would be your death," is the answer. 

" * 'T is down in yonder garden green, 
Love, where we used to walk, 
The finest flower that e'er was seen 
Is withered to a stalk,' " — 

perhaps as much too neat as the final stanza is too feebly 

1 Nos. 78, 77, 272, 79. 



RETURN OF THE DEAD 221 

pious for ballad style. "Sweet William's Ghost," * to use 
the critical word-of-all-work, is far more convincing. To 
get the meaning of ballad-treatment in a case like this, the 
reader should compare not so much the obvious parallels 
in tradition as poems like Wordsworth's "Laodamia" or 
Goethe's "Braut von Corinth," poems, noble as they are, 
which have that second intention never found in a sound 
ballad of tradition. William comes back from the grave 
and asks Margaret for his "faith and troth." She desires 
a kiss, and he gives her the usual warning. She stretches 
out her hand, or, in another version, a stick on which she 
has "stroked her troth," and returns him his plighted 
faith. He thanks her, and vanishes; but she follows him 
far to his grave, only to be told that there is no room there 
for her, — or that there is room. In one version, before 
she will give back her troth, she asks her lover a question 
about the other world, a question perhaps not without 
significance: What becomes of women w T ho die in tra- 
vail ? Their beds, he replies, are made in heaven by our 
Lord's knee, well set about with gillyflowers. Spirits 
often demand back or give back plighted faith; in the 
"Child of Bristowe," 2 a dead father makes the effort 
twice. Rubbing the stick may be a precaution in transfer, 
to avoid direct touch, as savages rub an afflicted part upon 

1 On comparison with the Helgi lay, see Bugge, Heltedigtene, i, 206 ff. 
(1896). 

2 Ed. Hazlitt, v, 373 ff. 

" Therefor, sone, y pray the, 
Gef me my trouthe y left with the, 
And let me wynde my way." 



THE BALLADS 

a tree to get rid of the disease. 1 But the lover sometimes 
came back to claim not his troth, but the bride herself. 
"If ever the dead come for the quick, be sure, Mar- 
garet, I'll come again for thee," promises the hero of this 
ballad; and if "The Suffolk Miracle," even more than 
"James Harris," is "blurred, enfeebled, and disfigured" 
in broadside shape, it tells, after its silly and imperfect 
fashion, the tale found everywhere in Europe, often in 
ballad form, the basis of Burger's famous "Lenore," — 
which was at one time thought to have been taken from 
"The Suffolk Miracle" itself. 2 This, however, Burger 
never saw; nor could it inspire anybody or anything. For- 
tunately we do not leave the matter here. If the clumsy 
broadside marks as low a fall as decent materials can ever 
reach, traditional verse of any land seldom rises to the 
height of our best "supernatural" ballad, "The Wife of 
Usher's Well." "Nothing that we have," says Mr. Child, 
"is more profoundly affecting." And it is quite sufficient 
as it stands in the Minstrelsy version from the recitation 
of an old woman in Lothian. Even so good a poet as 
Allingham has gained little by combination, and has lost 
pitiably by invention where he supplies a stanza of his 
own "to complete the sense." There is a background of 
old legends, of old myth: the mother will have ocean 
storms never cease till her three sons come back, and in 

1 Interesting is Uhland's note on the loss of color in trees, or the like, 
accounting for paleness and what not, Kl. Schrift. iii, 405, and note to 
Volhslieder, no. 99, p. 488. 

2 Child, v, 60, note. 



LEGEND 223 

the mirk November night they do come, with signs of the 
other world upon them; she welcomes them with all she 
has, makes their bed wide, and sits down by them, till 
the crowing of the cocks, here faintly reminiscent of Scan- 
dinavian mythology, calls them to their place. What 
marks our ballad, however, is its singular dignity, its 
reticence. The repetitions, while of the traditional bal- 
lad form, are impressive and not loquacious; and the 
concluding stanza, spoken by the youngest son, would 
be hard to surpass : — 

" ' Fare ye weel, my mother dear, 
Fareweel to barn and byre ; 
And fare ye weel, the bonny lass 
That kindles my mother's fire.' " * 

IV. LEGENDARY BALLADS 

Many of the ballads named in the preceding section 
could be transferred to this, and some now to be described, 
if regarded from another point of view, might well take 
their places elsewhere; on the whole, however, the general 
idea of transition through local and historical pieces to 
the deliberate epic of the chronicle class will justify the 
arrangement which has been made. 

Classical traditions, which probably gave Hero and 

1 A version from Shropshire, and one from North Carolina, in the 
United States, make the widow pray to Christ, or to God ; in the 
former, Jesus sends the three sons back, and they escort their mother to 
the door of heaven, where Jesus bids her return to repent for nine days, 
then takes her in. In the second version, the oldest "baby" wakes up 
his brothers and bids farewell to the mother. — Child, iii, 513; v, 294. 



224 THE BALLADS 

Leander as a theme to so many ballads of the conti- 
nent, have sent a fragment to the far coast of Shetland. 
"King Orfeo," of course, comes directly from medieval 
romance; but the old story of Orpheus and Eurydice is 
here, changed in name and place, but still more changed 
by its genuine and traditional ballad setting. It may be 
quoted in part, omitting the almost unintelligible Scandi- 
navian refrain. A king lives in the east, a lady in the west. 
Presumably she is wooed and won, but tradition, or the 
singer's memory, is silent about that. The king goes 
hunting, leaving his "Lady Isabel" alone, and at last 
learns her fate : the king of Faery has pierced her bosom 
with his dart. Some verses are lost, in which he sees her 
among fairy folk, follows, and comes to a gray stone. 

" Dan he took oot his pipes ta play, 
Bit sair his hert wi' dol an wae. 

"And first he played da notes o' noy, 
An dan he played da notes o' joy. 

" An dan he played da god gabber reel, 
Dat meicht ha' made a sick hert hale. 



" *Noo come ye in inta wir ha', 1 
And come ye in among wis aV 

" Now he 's gaen in inta dar ha', 
An he's gaen in among dem a'. 

"Dan he took out his pipes to play, 
Bit sair his hert wi' dol an wae. 

1 A messenger has come from behind the gray stone, and asked him 
into the hillside. 



KING ORFEO 225 

"An first he played da notes o' noy, 
An dan he played da notes o' joy. 

" An dan he played da god gabber reel, 
Dat meicht ha' made a sick hert hale. 

" * Noo tell to us what ye will hae : 
What sail we gie you for your play ? ' 

" * What I will hae I will you tell, 
An dat 's me lady Isabel.' 

" * Yees tak your lady, an yees gaeng hame, 
An' yees be king ower a' your ain.' 

"He's taen his lady, an' he 's gaen hame, 
An' noo he's king ower a' his ain." 

Our interest here is aroused in the concentration upon a 
single situation, with thin strips of narrative at beginning 
and end, and in the inevitable structure of the piece. The 
refrain must not be forgotten; and one would feel no 
surprise upon hearing that the ballad was a real ballad, 
danced and acted as well as sung. In any case, there is the 
story of Orpheus, — or half of it, — in Shetland; and 
it is a purely traditional, oral ballad. When, however, a 
sacred legend grew popular in verse and traditional, it 
was pretty sure to be written down. The oldest recorded 
English ballad is of this class, 1 and was preserved until 
lately in a thirteenth-century manuscript at Trinity Col- 
lege, Cambridge. As in the old riddle ballad of the fif- 
teenth century, "Inter Diabolus et Virgo," the repetitions 
are here in part neglected, but the ballad structure, the 
simple conception, the dialogue, are maintained, not to 
1 See for these legends and carols, nos. 23, 22, 21, 54, 55, 56, 155. 



226 THE BALLADS 

mention absurd details like the collusion of Judas's sister 
in the theft of his money, and the trivial motive for his 
betrayal of Christ. In smoother but similar seven-beat 
verses, two to the stanza, is told the charming little legend 
of St. Stephen, "clerk in King Herod's hall," who is 
bringing the boar's head, the right Christmas dish, when 
he sees the star bright over Bethlehem : — 

"He kyst adoun the boris hed and went into the halle: 
'I forsak the, Kyng Herowdes, and thi werkes alle. 

" *I forsak the, Kyng Herowdes, and thi werkes alle; 
Ther is a chyld in Bedlem born is beter than we alle.' " 

Is Stephen mad ? The thing is as true, quoth Herod, as 
that yon capon in the dish shall crow; whereupon the 
capon crows "Christus natus est!" Stephen, very illogi- 
cally, is sent out to be stoned to death; "and therefore is 
his even on Christ's own day." * In "The Maid and the 
Palmer," a woman is washing at the well; a palmer asks 
her for drink and is told she has neither cup nor can. "If 
your lover came back, you 'dfind cups and cans." Shesays 
she has no lover. "Peace! You have borne nine children ! " 
She asks if he is "the good old man that all the world 
believes upon," and demands penance. In Scandinavian 
ballads, he is called Jesus outright. He tells her she is to 
be a stepping-stone for seven years, seven more a clapper 
in a bell, still seven again she must "lead an ape in hell," 
and may then come maiden home. The ultimate source 
is the Samaritan woman blended with Mary Magdalen 
1 S. Stephen's "own day" is of course 26th December. 



SACRED TRADITION 227 

and even with Martha; * but the English version from 
the Percy Folio betrays nothing of this. Moreover it is in 
the usual four-beat ballad measure of two verses and 
refrain. The other three ballads of this group are really 
carols. In the "Cherry-Tree Carol," Joseph refuses to 
pluck Mary one cherry from the orchard ; whereupon the 
unborn babe commands the highest tree to bend down 
and give fruit to his mother. In "The Carnal and the 
Crane," a crow wishes to know many things about the 
birth of Christ, and the wise crane answers him. The most 
. interesting legend which is woven in here is that of the 
husbandman, sowing his seed, by whom Joseph, Mary, 
and Jesus passed in their flight. Jesus bids him God- 
speed; he shall fetch ox and wain to carry home this day 
the corn he has sown. The farmer falls on his knees; 
"thou art the redeemer of mankind." He is told to say, 
should any inquire, that Jesus passed by him as he was 
sowing his grain; Herod comes along as he is gathering 
the crop, and is furious at the inference of a captain that 
"full three quarters of a year" have elapsed since it 
was sown. "Dives and Lazarus," telling the familiar 
story, is remarkable for its pervasive incremental repe- 
tition; it is in the four-line ballad measure. Besides 
these legendary pieces in Child's collection, a fresh can- 
didate for ballad honors has recently appeared in "The 
Bitter Withy," or "The Withies;" and it is hard to see 
why it should not be ranged with the rest. It has fallen 
into homely courses of style and phrase, and the ex- 
1 Child, i, 229. 



228 THE BALLADS 

planatory stanza with which it closes is very rare in bal 
ladry, "St. Stephen and Herod" furnishing perhaps the 
only parallel. Professor Gerould, in a paper read before 
the Modern Language Association, shows that tales 
about the childhood of Christ, taken from the apocryphal 
gospels, were current in both the north and the south 
of Britain. The ball-playing is conventional; the sun- 
beam-bridge and the catastrophe are, of course, the main 
affair; and the chastisement, along with the reason for 
the withy's nature, is not unskilfully added. 

THE BITTER WITHY 1 

As it fell out on a Holy day 

The drops of rain did fall, did fall, 
Our Saviour asked leave of His mother Mary 

If He might go play at ball. 

" To play at ball my own dear Son, 
It 's time You was going or gone, 
But be sure let me hear no complaint of You 
At night when You do come home." 

It was upling scorn and downling scorn, 
Oh, there He met three jolly jerdins: 2 

Oh, there He asked the three jolly jerdins 
If they would go play at ball. 

1 Communicated by Mr. F. Sidgwick to Notes and Queries, Series 10, 
no. 83, with information in regard to the ballad's provenience and 
traditional character. See also The Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 
ii, 205, 300 ff„ for other versions. 

2 In the Sussex version, " jolly dons;" Herefordshire, "jolly jor- 
rans;" Manchester, merely "children;" and in a carol, which tells 
the first part of the story, " virgins." 






THE BITTER WITHY 229 

"Oh, we are lords' and ladies' sons, 
Born in bower or in hall, 
And You are but some poor maid's child 
Born'd in an ox's stall." 

"If you are lords' and ladies' sons, 
Born'd in bower or in hall, 
Then at the very last I'll make it appear 
That I am above you all." 

Our Saviour built a bridge with the beams of the sun, 

And over He gone, He gone He. 
And after followed the three jolly jerdins, 

And drownded they were all three. 

It was upling scorn and downling scorn, 
The mothers of them did whoop and call, 

Crying out, "Mary mild, call back your Child, 
For ours are drownded all." 

Mary mild, Mary mild, called home her Child, 

And laid our Saviour across her knee, 
And with a whole handful of bitter withy 

She gave Him slashes three. 

Then He says to His mother, "Oh! the withy, oh! the 
withy, 

The bitter withy that causes me to smart, to smart, 
Oh! the withy it shall be the very first tree 

That perishes at the heart." 

Best known of all the legends, and a widespread ballad, 
is "Sir Hugh," which should also be read in the exquisite 
Prioress's Tale of Chaucer for the difference between 
artless and artistic narrative. The two stories are distinct; 
nothing in the ballad corresponds to the devotion of the 
little "clergeoun" and his reward; but one mother is as 



230 THE BALLADS 

pathetic as the other, and a feature of Chaucer's tale has 
crept into the traditional Scottish version of the ballad. 
" Gin ye be there, my sweet Sir Hugh, I pray you to me 
speak," and again, "Where'er ye be, my sweet Sir Hugh," 
may be compared with the description of the other 
searcher "with mother's pity in her breast enclosed." 

Legend clung to old ballad ways. But romance, 
specially as it is retold by the minstrels, works into the 
chronicle and longer epic style. "Hind Horn," 1 to be 
sure, is still situation with a mere touch of explanatory 
narrative; it gives "little more than the catastrophe of the 
famous Gest of King Horn," adding the silver wand with 
larks on it — birds to tell Horn of events ? — and the ring 
whose stone pales at approach of misfortune, as romantic 
features. But the situation is everything, and it is treated 
in thorough ballad wise: repetition, refrain, and a local, 
mainly Scottish, setting. "Young Beichan," 2 however, a 
favorite both in Scottish tradition and in English broad- 
side, — it is one with "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bate- 
man," which Cruikshank illustrated, — runs well to the 
romantic plan. Beichan, whose adventures agree in part 
with those in the legend of Gilbert Beket, father of 
St. Thomas, is taken prisoner by a Moor, released by the 
daughter on promise of marriage, goes home, and is about 
to wed another woman, when Susie Pye, the Moor's 
daughter, appears at his gates, is recognized, baptized as 
"Lady Jane," and married to Beichan. Dialogue is 
retained, but there is abundant explanation as well as 
1 No. 17. 2 No. 53. 



MINSTREL BALLADS 231 

narrative. In one amusing case the reciter or minstrel 
reveals himself : — 

"An' I hop' this day she sal be his bride," — 

he says of Susie, at her love's gate, just as the complica- 
tion is to be announced. With "Sir Cawline," 1 as with 
"King Estmere," already noticed, we are fairly in the 
romantic ballads; it "may possibly be formed upon a 
romance in stanzas, which itself was composed from 
earlier ballads," says Professor Child. "Events" crowd 
this ballad mightily. Sir Cawline, sick with love for the 
king's daughter, meets an elritch knight, a giant who is 
also a soldan, and finally a false steward, who lets loose 
a lion upon the unarmed Cawline at his prayers; but he 
wins his love at last, and they have "fifteen sons." An- 
other ballad of adventure in the Percy Manuscript, "Sir 
Lionel," 2 has kept the older way, and may show the sort 
of ballad out of which a romance like "Sir Cawline" was 
made; there are also traditional versions, likewise in two- 
line stanzas with refrain. These ballads keep their 
dignity; absurdity and helplessness, however, beset such 
a poor affair as "John Thomson and the Turk," 3 which 
belongs in the negligible l| s t. 

Minstrel ballads, 4 so called, either treat a romantic old 
theme with a kind of impudent ease, or else treat an easy 
theme with success. "The Boy and the Mantle" is "a 
good piece of minstrelsy," as Professor Child calls it, but 

1 No. 61; see Child, ii, 61. 2 No. 18. 

3 No. 266. 4 See nos. 29, 30, 31, 267, 273. 



232 THE BALLADS 

it "would not go to the spinning-wheel at all." "King 
Arthur and King Cornwall" and "The Marriage of Sir 
Gawa#i," one in eight, the other in seven fragments, from 
the mutilated Percy Manuscript, are of the same minstrel 
source, and treat matters well known in romance. These 
are long poems. 1 Shorter and more familiar, meant for 
less critical audiences, are edifying stories like the "Heir 
of Linn," and that prime favorite with humble folk, the 
discomfiture of royalty at the hands of a yokel; for the 
style and the faint waft of tradition about it, "King Ed- 
ward and the Tanner" is included with ballads, while 
"Rauf Coilyear" and others go with "metrical tales." So 
we pass through the jocose to the slightly improper, and 
through the slightly improper to the merry narratives 
which are both "broad" and "gross." The list of these 
is not long; 2 and one of them, " The Baffled Knight," is 
harmless enough. The cynical "Crow and Pie," conceded 
to minstrel-making, is very close to the rout of such things 
as Tom D'Urfey selected for his "Pills to Purge Melan- 
choly" and modern collectors gather in privately printed 
and privately perused editions. Of the "Broomfield 
Hill," which the freedom of a couple of centuries ago 
allowed women to quote as they pleased, versions dif- 
fer; one, says Mr. Child very happily, one smells of 

1 They are ballads because, as Professor Kittredge says, in his Intro- 
duction to the Cambridge edition of the Ballads, p. xxvii, they are 

'composed in the popular style and perpetuated for a time by oral 
tradition." 

2 The editors of the Cambridge edition were forced to leave out but 
five of the three hundred and five ballads printed in the large collection. 



HUMOROUS BALLADS 233 

the broom and another of the groom. The lady makes 
tryst with a knight at the Broomfield Hill, but is told by 
a witch-woman how she can come maiden home. The 
knight sleeps until too late; and in the better version 
there is a good dialogue between him and his steed or 

hawk. 

" ■ I stamped wi' my foot, master, 
And gar'd my bridle ring, 
But na kin' thing wald waken ye 
Till she was past and gane,' " 

says the horse; and the hawk: — 

" ' I clapped wi' my wings, master, 
And aye my bells I rang, 
And aye cried, Waken, waken, master, 
Before the ladye gang.' " 

There is all the difference in the world between this, or a 
jolly bit of fun like "Our Goodman" already cited, and 
a thoroughly debased and dingy affair like "The Keach in 
the Creel." "The Jolly Beggar," especially in the Old 
Lady's Manuscript, makes a kind of amends at the close, 
and has a dash and jingle in it that half redeem it. And 
the Old Lady did take it into her manuscript! "The 
Friar in the Well" is an ancient story; and four other 
ballads of this merry kind are harmless enough: the 
"Crafty Farmer," w T ho baffles a highwayman, riding off 
on the thief's horse with the thief's plunder, besides sav- 
ing his own saddle-bags; two matrimonial jests, "The 
Wife Wrapt in Wether's Skin," a drastic taming of the 
shrew, and "The Farmer's Curst Wife," who is returned 
by Satan as impossible in a w r ell-ordered Inferno, — a 



234 THE BALLADS 

ballad sung in Sussex with a "Chorus of whistlers" to 
the two-line stanza; and finally the never-tiring verses 
of "Get Up and Bar the Door," which even a Goethe 
condescended to translate from this or whatever other 
version. 

Still mainly in the ballad style and formed by the ballad 
structure are sundry popular and traditional perversions 
of historical fact. These vary both from actual tradition 
and thoroughly popular conception to the manufactured 
broadside which holds a few shreds of communal stuff, 
and from important events to mere local tradition. For 
the tragic account, a little threnody "current throughout 
Scotland," as well as in England, records the popular but 
erroneous belief that Jane Seymour died from the Cesa- 
rean section at the birth of Prince Edward. 1 It is brief, of 
course, lyrical, with a bit of dialogue, and a commonplace 
for close : — 

" They mourned in the kitchen, and they mourned in the ha', 
But royal King Henry mourn'd langest of a\" 

A fragment in the Percy Folio reflects popular notions 
about Thomas Cromwell's disgrace and death; he seems 
to be playing John the Baptist to Katharine Howard's 
daughter of Herodias and bluff King Hal's Herod. Even 
more popular in tone is "Queen Eleanor's Confession," 
still sung in rural England ; the old jest of a husband who 
disguises himself as a friar in order to shrive his wife and 
hear of her sins against him, is made even more grim by 
the association, also in friar's garb, of the queen's lover. 
1 The Death of Queen Jane, no. 170. 



JOURNALISTIC BALLADS 235 

The king, when all was heard, "looked over his left 

shoulder . . . 

" And said, ' Earl Martial, but for my oath, 
Then hanged shouldst thou be.' " 

Grundtvig says that this ballad, very poorly translated, 
is recited about Denmark with a Norwegian queen in the 
main part. 1 

At the other extreme from such popular and traditional 
verse are the ballads made to order, as it were, after a stir- 
ring event. Journalism triumphs in "Lord Delamere," 
one version of which was taken down from recitation in 
Derbyshire, but must have been learned originally fi;om 
some broadside such as Professor Child prints as second 
choice. We miss the lilt and swing of the throng, even at 
third or fourth hand, in this caterwauling rime. It is 
helpless jog-trot, not the spinster's or the knitter's tune, 
but the butterwoman's rank to market; compared with 
the rhythm of a traditional ballad, with its style and form 
generally, with the spirit of really popular verse, these 
pieces of the "Delamere" sort sink out of sight, as if they 
fell from "Sweet William's Ghost" to the level of " James 
Harris." It is not only their speech that bewrays them. 
So far as facts go, however, there is as much perversion in 
one set as in the other. Like "Lord Delamere " in style, 
though better in execution, are sundry ballads based on 
international events real or supposed. "Hugh Spencer's 
Feats in France," prodigiously patriotic in the good old 
"frog-eater" vein with a touch of Dr. Johnson's opinion 
1 Nos. 171, 156; for the following, see 207, 158, 164, 284. 



236 THE BALLADS 

that "foreigners are fools," has plenty of repetition and 
uses the ballad commonplaces. Here is the familiar choice 
of three steeds, though with a difference and an extraor- 
dinary climax. Hugh, intending to joust for England's 
honor, finds no mere French horse that can bear him, 
white, brown, or black; so he calls for his old hackney 
from England. 1 The French spear breaks, of course; 
Spencer cannot get an English substitute, and several 
spears have to be bound together for his use. His remark 
to the French queen, which brings about this tourney, 
must have surprised the court, unaccustomed as it was 
to good, bluff English: — 

" * You have not wiped your mouth, madam, 
Since I heard you tell a lye.' M 

Finally he runs amuck, killing all sorts of warriors; and 
the frightened monarch of France agrees to peace with 
England on any terms. 2 "King Henry the Fifth's Con- 
quest of France" gives the story of the tennis-balls in 
dialogue, then briefly sums the triumphant battles and 
the march, by our balladist's account, "to Paris gates." 
"John Dory" was popular enough in the seventeenth 
century; it has the rollicking manner in more attractive 
guise. John Dory, perhaps Doria, goes to Paris : — 

1 These ballads are straightforward, at least, and unsophisticated. 
The Rose of England, no. 166, has neither quality, but is an elaborate 
allegory of the white and red. The red rose of Lancaster is rooted up 
by a boar (Richard III), and so on. 

2 In B and C, the coal-black steed is chosen; C, from Aberdeen, trans- 
fers its patriotism north of the Tweed, and makes "Sir Hugh" a Scot. 
This recited version is full of incremental repetition. 



BALLADS OF THE SEA 237 

" The first man that John Dory did meet 
Was good King John of France-a; 
John Dory could well of his courtesie, 
But fell down in a trance-a," 

offering, nevertheless, to bring "all the churles in Merry 
England," bound, before the king. A Cornishman 
named Nicholl meets John Dory's ship, and the boaster, 
after a hot fight, is clapt fast under hatches. Not so good 
are four ballads of the sea, 1 broadsides, but probably 
enjoyed by their humble singers ; only one need be named. 
"The Sweet Trinity," a ship built by Sir Walter Raleigh 
in the Netherlands, was not worthy of her little ship-boy, 
who swam off with an auger, and sank the "false gallaly," 
but failed to get the reward promised him. Our best 
naval piece, of course, is "Sir Andrew Barton;" 2 it is of 
the chronicle order, long, awkward in diction, but has the 
genuine ballad manner in treating its main situation, and 
tells the story of the sea-fight in lively, hearty style. The 
helpless note, of course, is there. "Henery" Hunt, the 
victim, informer, and word-breaker, — 

" With a pure heart and a penitent mind, " — 

is ridiculous; but an older version may have done him 
justice. There are several puzzles in naval architecture 
which all the study of ships in Henry VIII's time has not 
yet solved; and an old superstition survives when Lord 

1 Nos. 285, 286, 287, 288. Raleigh is left out of 286, B; the ship is 
built in the Lowlands, but is called The Golden Vanity. 

2 No. 167. Henry Martyn, no. 250, is an offshoot of the longer and 
older ballad. 



238 THE BALLADS 

Howard throws the pirate's headless body overboard, 
with three hundred crowns about the middle : — 

"Whersoeuer thou lands, itt will bury thee." 
King Hal, too, is chivalrous; he would give a hundred 
pound if Sir Andrew were alive. 

These are English ballads, bad and good. It is worthy 
of note that Scots ballads of the same class, excepting here 
and there an "Earl Bothwell" with its "I shall you tell 
how it befell," seldom drop into the doggerel style, but 
tend to keep a firm grasp of the situation, to maintain the 
old structure and repetition, and to observe a kind of 
dramatic brevity. "The Laird o' Logie" presents crisply 
an adventure at the Scottish court under James VI, a 
gentlewoman freeing her lover from prison and the gal- 
lows; while "King James and Brown," from the Percy 
Folio, tells loosely and drearily a story of the same sover- 
eign in his younger days. Brown, the hero, is an English- 
man, and the ballad is plainly from an English source. 
That it is a ballad, however, and that traditional verse, 
even when sunk to the broadside, is quite a different 
thing from journalism, may be readily seen by comparing 
it with a poem on another of Brown's adventures written 
by the much -ridiculed Elderton. Scottish versions con- 
trive to keep a better traditional tone, even in such 
slight and unmeritable pieces as "The Laird of Waris- 
ton," where the laird is killed by a servant at the insti- 
gation of the wife. She had some excuse. 

" He spak a word in jest, 
Her answer wasna good ; 



MARY HAMILTON 239 

He threw a plate at her face, 
Made it a' gush out blood. . . . 

"The Foul Thief knotted the tether, 
She lifted his head on hie, 
The nourice drew the knot 
That gard lord Wariston die." 

Higher verse for higher themes. 1 An incident of feud or 
raid, a burnt castle and slain inmates, make up "Captain 
Car," already cited, and "The Fire of Frendraught," 
where the lady of the castle sets it on fire that she may 
destroy a hated guest, and "The Bonny House o' Airlie," 
where Argyll burns down Lady Margaret's house, but 
spares her life. She is properly defiant, and would give 
not only her house, but all her sons for Prince Charlie. 
"James Grant" makes a clever escape. But the best of 
all is that ballad of crime in high life, "Mary Hamilton." 
It is evidently founded on fact, and the fact, as Scott 
pointed out, seems to have been a case of child-murder at 
the court of Mary Queen of Scots, in 1563, for which the 
mother and the father — Queen's apothecary, but in the 
ballad "highest Stewart of all" — were hanged. By a 
curious coincidence, one Mary Hamilton, a maid of honor 
at Peter the Great's court in 1718, was executed for the 
same offense; and this affair, of which all the details are 
known, was at first thought by Mr. Child to be the foun- 
dation of our ballad. Later 2 he gave up Peter's Mary 

1 Nos. 178, 196, 199, 197, 173. 

2 See v, 298 f . The fear that sailors may tell her father and mother of 
her disgrace and death (iii, 383) seemed to make positively for the Rus- 
sian theory. But see Mr. A. Lang in Blackwood's Magazine, Sept., 1895. 



240 THE BALLADS 

Hamilton as less probable than the Queen's Mary; and 
so all the evidence would now seem to point. But the 
ballad is the main thing. Twenty-eight versions of it are 
extant, — a few fragmentary, but most of them giving the 
story in full; and in all of these the hand of tradition, not 
of the maker or copyist or improver, has been at work. 
No ballad could offer better proof of the tendency of tra- 
ditional material to vary in all its details, but to remain 
steadfast in its structural form. The famous concluding 
stanza of the version printed below is final in only five 
cases; three versions open with it, and it occurs incident- 
ally in eleven. The color triad is fairly constant; but the 
variations of the seventeenth stanza are worthy of note. 
It makes the conclusion of one version: — 

" Yestreen I made Queen Mary's bed, 
Kembed down her yellow hair ; 
Is this the reward I am to get, 
To tread this gallows-stair?" 

This is expanded or varied; seven years she has done 
these things, or else a stanza is very properly assigned to 
each industry, bed-making and hair-dressing, while one 
of Scott's copies more significantly ends thus: — 

"Aft hae I wash'd the king's bonnie face, 
Kaim'd down his yellow hair ; 
And this is a' the reward he's geen me, 
The gallows to be my share." 

It is no part of the popular ballad to create or describe 
a character ; seldom is there even external description, 
and then it is only of the conventional kind. One of the 



MARY HAMILTON 241 

signs of dominant epic interest, and of the transfer from 
tradition to edition, is the incipient characterization 
which one notes in the " Gest of Robin Hood." Robin has 
sundry little ways of his own. He will not dine until some 
guest turns up, just as Arthur, on festal days, would not 
break his fast until an adventure occurred. In the higher 
mood of character, Robin harms no woman, takes from 
no poor man, is devoted to Our Lady. I Even a heroic 
ballad like "Otterburn" tells something of its hero 
besides his feats; but the ballad of situation, in its primi- 
tive shape and in its best survivals, essays nothing of the 
kind. It is the deed, a swift back-and-forth of dialogue, a 
series of stanzas to accent its phase of the situation, which 
flash before us. There is no room for presenting character. 
fin "Mary Hamilton," however, or in that part of it which 
most struck popular fancy, tradition developed something 
very like a "character," an individuality, which means 
more than a mere person filling the mould of an event. 
True, the phrases which express this character are them- 
selves traditional, and have drifted in on the four winds 
of balladry; nothing is fixed; no effort at description is 
made, and even the modern reporter's inevitable adjective 
of beauty is absent. But the girl's loud defiance, her reck- 
less flouting of a weak king, her wild pledge melting into 
tenderness at thought of home, her reproach for the hard 
queen's ingratitude, and the famous closing stanza with 
its admirable reticence in pathos, — these things make 
Mary Hamilton sufficiently individual. She has borne a 
child, as the ballad thinks, to Darnley, "highest Stewart 



242 THE BALLADS 

of a'," and has thrown it into the sea to sink or swim x — 
"bonnie wee babe" she calls it, with faint memory of the 
old exposure rite and a mother's hope for rescue; she 
has been detected by the auld queen, and bidden to ride to 
Edinburgh attired in black or brown. She rides in white; 
laughs her loud laughters three as she goes up for trial; 
and comes down the Canongate condemned, while 
many a lady from window on window weeps for Mary's 
fate. 

"'Make never meen 2 for me,' she says, 
* Make never meen for me; 
Seek never grace frae a graceless face, 
For that ye '11 never see. 

" ■ Bring me a bottle of wine,' she says, 
1 The best that e'er ye hae, 
That I may drink to my weil-wishers 
And they may drink to me. 

" * Here 's a health to the jolly sailors 
That sail upon the main ; 
Let them never let on to my father and mother 
But what I m coming hame. 

" * Here 's a health to the jolly sailors 
That sail upon the sea; 
Let them never let on to my father and mother 
That I cam here to dee. 



1 SoY,5: 



11 ■ I put it in a bottomless boat 
And bade it sail the sea.' " 



2 "Moan." This stanza is E, 13; the rest is A. That the "king's 
face gives grace" is an old saying: see Hill's Boswell, iii, 121, note. 
For riding along the "Cannogate," see a very interesting sketch of 
Edinburgh in 1544, in Mr. A. Lang's Mystery of Mary Stuart. 



MARY HAMILTON 243 

" * O little did my mother think, 
The day she cradled me, 
What lands I was to travel through, 
What death I was to dee. 

"«0 little did my father think, 
The day he held up me, 
What lands I was to travel through, 
What death I was to dee. 

"'Last night I wash'd the queen's feet, 
And gently laid her down ; 
And a' the thanks I 've gotten the nicht 
To be hang'd in Edinbro town ! 

" ' Last nicht there was four Maries, 
The nicht there '1 be but three ; 
There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beton, 
And Marie Carmichael, and me.' " 

We could not part more appropriately from the genuine 
ballad of tradition, still undeveloped into epic breadth, 
than with this fine version on our lips. 

V. THE BORDER BALLADS 

The longer chronicle ballads are mainly traditional, 
but they have made good progress on the epic road. Some 
of them may come down to us as they were composed by 
the border folk whose feats they celebrate; but narrative 
art, of whatever origin, has laid hold of them as a class. 
Their faces are set away from the old lingering and dra- 
matic fashion ; if repetition and increment now and then 
intrude, the intrusion is marked. They are not, like 
"Mary Hamilton" and "Captain Car," sung and trans- 
mitted along with a lyric brevity, a lyric intensity; but 



244 THE BALLADS 

they are told at epic will and in ample detail. To some 
extent they answer the call for history, like old Germanic 
ballads; people listened to them, — by invitation of the 
reciter in his opening lines, and not without a kind of 
acknowledgment of good audience and due pious civilities 
at the close. The feigned Canterbury raconteur and the 
actual reciter of a long ballad observed the same sort of 
etiquette, even to the prayer: — 

" Jhesue Crist our balys bete, 1 
And to the blys us brynge ! 
Thus was the hountynge of the Chivyat : 
God send us alle good endyng ! " 

The nun's priest ends his tale with a similar prayer; but 
Sir Knight is more terse: — 

" Thus endith Palamon and Emelye ; 
And God save al this faire compaignye." 

"God save al the rowte," blurts out the miller. It would 
be interesting to know how Chaucer fancied the actual 
recitation of his Canterbury Tales. His flexible coup- 
lets and his smooth stanzas called for something better 
than the chanting of a blind crowder ; but it would 
be wide of the mark if one should assume for them the 
"easy, conversational tone" enjoined upon public readers 
and orators of our day. They were recited, doubtless, as 
very distinct verse. The "drasty riming," however, was 
suppressed, and metre was not commended to the ear as 
sing-song. Long chronicle ballads, too, must have tried 
for something of the same epic freedom in recitation; 
1 "Mend our ills." 



SINGING AND SAYING 245 

while they were bound to the familiar rhythm, and asso- 
ciated with traditional tunes, in the majority of eases we 
are not to think of them as actually sung. The old 
antithesis of "sing or say" may guide us in the matter; 
originally both danced and sung, then sung to a tradi- 
tional tune as narrative lyrics, ballads that had passed 
beyond such singable brevity and had struck into the long 
epic road were doubtless recited in a kind of chant that 
was rhythmic, harmonious, but without notes. 

"He saved a lay, a maner song, 
Withoute noote, withoute song," 1 

writes Chaucer of the knight who, with a " deadly, sor- 
rowful sound," is composing a complaint; but this is 
lyric. To "sing and say," a hendiadys for telling a story 
in song, is a very frequent formula, but the antithetical 
phrase is quite as old. 2 Ballads of the chronicle type, we 
may be sure, had dropped their lyric quality along with 
the repetitions and the refrain; they were not "sung," 
but "said." True, certain of the border songs were sung 
lustily enough, and at prodigious length. Sidney speaks 
of his blind crowder as singing, however rude the voice; 
and, above all, we are told that long ballads, even of the 
Robin Hood order, were used directly for the dance. But 
versions change, and our text of the "Cheviot," if that 

1 Identical rime indicates a difference in meaning. 

2 Interesting in this particular is Malmesbury's account of Aldhelm's 
amiable vagaries, Gesfa Pontificum, c. 190: "poesim Anglicam posse 
facere, eadem apposite vel canere vel dicere. . . ." In Spenser's Epitha- 
larnium: " You that say or sing," and in G. Herbert's Posie : " Whether I 
sing or say or dictate," lies the same antithesis. Examples are endless. 



246 THE BALLADS 

ballad is what Sidney heard, is almost certainly not the 
text of Sidney's day. One feels that older forms of a 
chronicle ballad must have had twice the repetition and 
half the details which mark it now. Moreover, when a 
ballad is named with its dance, one cannot be sure that 
it is the ballad which we happen to know under that title. 
"The Complaynt of Scotland," * in a famous passage, 
mentions a group of shepherds who first tell tales, then 
sing songs and ballads, — including the "Hunttis of 
Chevet," — and finally fall to dancing, with "Robene 
hude" and "Ihonne Ermistrangis dance" among the 
measures named. The group and sequence have a slightly 
artificial and literary look, like the naval episode in the 
same work; but apart from this, apart even from the 
suggestion that the "Robene hude" was only a "Chan- 
son de Robin," a "merrie and extemporall song," and 
conceding that quite long and lugubrious poems, like 
Mannington's "Lamentation," were used for the dance, 
it is clear that "Robin Hood and the Monk" and other 
extant ballads of the sort had no such office. They 
appeal too directly to epic interest. Dances were com- 
mon at medieval funerals, naturally to a slow measure; 
the Lityerses song in Greece was a very mournful affair; 
but the steady pace of epic, with accumulating interest 
for its hearers, with lyric elements reduced to a mini- 

1 Edited by Murray for the Early English Text Soc., 1872, pp. lxxii, 
63. In the play of The Four Elements, Hazlitt-Dodsley, i, 47, there is 
good fooling with description of a dance where folk sing the measure for 
it. The "Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood" is probably a genuine first 
line. 



THE BALLAD CHANT 247 

mum and all dramatic activity, even the chorus, sup- 
pressed, had long parted company with the dance. 

Many difficulties, however, will be removed from this 
thorny subject, if one assumes that the paths of reciter and 
singer, though separate, were not very far apart. Perhaps 
"chanting" would best describe the way in which a 
ballad-singer or minstrel fared who minded his poetic 
scheme, and gave his hearers their honest measure of 
verse; it is likely that the reading and the singing were 
kept fairly close together by an exact insistence upon the 
rhythmic plan. Time or rhythm is the main factor in early 
verse; that is what the communal dance both begets and 
requires. An abominable cheerfulness or naturalness 
enjoined by modern elocution, and a total neglect of all 
distinction between verse and prose, have put this old 
rhythmic rendering of poetry out of date; but Tennyson 
used to read aloud his own verses in the despised sing- 
song, while Carlyle swung a rapturous leg in time with the 
words, and muttered "Alfred's got it!" So with Tenny- 
son's peers of earlier date. Hazlitt, in " Winterslow,"says 
that there is "a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge 
and of Wordsworth which acts as a spell upon the hearer." 
Who, above all, would not have heard Scott himself, 
quickening his tired heart in the evil days, as he "chanted 
rather than repeated" his favorite version of "Otter- 
burn?" 1 Making prose out of verse, we may be sure, 
is a modern accomplishment; and rhythm was once an 
inviolable fact in poetry, whether recited or sung. Mr. 
1 See the details in Lockhart's Life under July, 1831. 



248 THE BALLADS 

Thomas Hardy is good authority for the ways of the 
Wessex peasant; and the aged Wessex peasant of forty 
years ago, when he sang a ballad, had four centuries of 
the habit behind him. There is much to be learned from 
Grandfer Cantle's eccentric performance on Blackbar- 
row; * the "sing," the "say," and something of choral 
reminiscence are all there. "With his stick in his hand, 
he began to jig a private minuet . . . also began to sing, 
in the voice of a bee up a flue : — 

"The king' call'd down' his no'-bles all', 
By one', by two', by three'; 
Earl Mar'-shal, I'll' go shrive' the queen', 
And thou' shalt wend' with me'." 

When old folk tried to recite a ballad to the collectors 
without this stay in a monotonous rhythmic chant, they 
often made sad work of it, and much disorder resulted 
in the copy. For example, a version of "The Wife of 
Usher's Well," taken down from the dictation of an aged 
fisherman in 1883, is badly damaged as verse. On the 
other hand, it is to that chanting vigor of recitation, in a 
style very close to singing, that we owe the almost uniform 
perfection of rhythm in our old ballads, short or long. 
We may begin our study of the longer pieces 2 with 

1 See The Return of the Native, chap. iii. 

2 See, for the following, nos. 184, 185, 192, 186, 187, 188, 189 ; also 
190, 191, 193. In studying the border ballads, we must remember the 
equality of all members of a Scottish clan, homogeneous conditions 
beyond dispute, and bear in mind, as Mr. Lang says, that "fidelity to a 
chief was more important than fidelity to king, country, and the funda- 
mental laws of morality." 



THE LADS OF WAMPHRAY 249 

"The Lads of "Wamphray," an old ballad based on the 
hanging of a freebooter about the year 1593, and the ven- 
geance taken by his nephew. It is in the two-line stanza, 
— Scott's "Minstrelsy" prints it wrongly, — was surely 
sung though we have no refrain with it, and is full of re- 
petitions and lively quotation : — 

u O Simmy, Simmy, now let me gang, 
• And I tow I '11 neer do a Crichton wrang. 

" O Simmy, Simmy, now let me be, 
And a peck o' goud I '11 gie to thee. 

u O Simmy, Simmy, let me gang, 
And my wife shall heap it wi' her hand." 

It differs, however, from the mass of ballads which were 
founded on deeds of the border, on feud, murder, burn- 
ings, in its fresh and immediate tone. It seems to spring 
straight from the fact; and one is tempted here, if any- 
where, to apply Bishop Leslie's ipsi confingunt, and to 
charge the making of the ballad to the very doers of its 
deed of revenge. It is certainly not made at long range. 
There is no epic detail, and even the opening eight 
stanzas may be an afterthought. One takes seriously 
enough the story of Cnut's improvisation on the waters 
by Ely, the chorus of nobles and attendants, and the 
resulting song of battle and conquest, — or, rather, one 
accepts the picture as true while doubting the authenti- 
city of the fragment ; change these persons and conditions 
to the chief of some lawless house, surrounded by his 
retainers, singing a humbler theme with ampler tradi- 



250 THE BALLADS 

tional store of word and phrase, and the making of border 
ballads by men-at-arms in improvisation and choral 
becomes a quite intelligible fact. Between this first rude 
song and the recorded ballad, as some collector took it 
from the last of a long series of traditional versions, there 
are innumerable chances of popular and local varia- 
tion, and of the "improvements" due to some vagrom 
bard. 

Another border ballad, popular in England and cited 
by Tom Nashe himself, is "Dick o' the Cow." * Here is 
far more detail; it is a good story told in high spirits 
throughout. Dick is a fool, a Cumberland yokel; but for 
his stolen cattle and his wife's stolen coverlets he gets 
fine return, and withal fells an Armstrong in fair fight. 
No wonder that lusty folk everywhere liked this ballad. 
"The Lochmaben Harper," to be sure, may make a 
stronger bid for patriotism; but the stealing of English 
King Henry's horse by a silly, blind Scots harper has a 
calculated jocosity which leaves it far behind "Dick o' 
the Cow." The latter, as its burden shows, was sung; 
and if it is over long for lyric purposes, its sometime 
singers would doubtless remark that there can never be 
too much of a good thing. Incremental repetition has left 
plain traces here and there; but one notes the far more 
prominent characteristic of repeating two concluding 
lines of a stanza as beginning of the next, — a common 
feature in ballads of the epic sort. Other narrative traits 

1 Cow "may possibly mean the hut in which he lived; or brush, or 
broom." — Child. 



KINMONT WILLIE 251 

abound. Quotation is indicated, and not, as in "The Lads 
of Wamphray," sprung without notice: — 

"Then Johne Armstrang to Willie can say, 
'Billie, a-rideing then will we."* 1 

In "Kinmont Willie," of which a very generous portion 
must be placed to the credit of Scott, so much, indeed, as 
to make it almost an imitated ballad, the first-person 
plural imparts a confidential tone, but fails to achieve 
the immediate effect of the other pieces; one seems to be 
reading something like a dramatic lyric of Browning, 
with mosstroopers instead of the old cavalier and without 
"my boy George," but all done to the life. Next, "in de- 
ference to history 1 -," comes what may be a free version of 
Kinmont W T illie's story, "Jock o' the Side," which Pro- 
fessor Child calls one of the best ballads in the world, and 
"enough to make a mosstrooper of any young borderer, 
had he lacked the impulse." Jock is set free from New- 
castle, Hobby Noble leading the small party of rescue, just 
as Willie was set free from Carlisle; the ballad stirs one's 
pulses with its opening line, and all is life and movement 
to the end. "Archie o' Cawfield," almost a repetition of 
"Jock," tells the same tale of rescue, two brothers here 
risking life and limb for a third ; the device of reversing the 
horses' shoes is mentioned, and the recurring verses: — 

" There was horsing, horsing of haste, 

And cracking o' whips out o'er the lee," 

put a fine breeze about one's ears as one reads. One of 

1 Can = gan, — simply "did." 



252 THE BALLADS 

the brothers says the night's work has cost him his land ; 
the answer is prompt : — 

" * Now wae light o' thee and thy lands baith, Jock, 
And even so baith the land and thee ! 
For gear will come and gear will gang, 
But three brothers again we were never to be ! ' " 

In "Hobie Noble," finally, we learn how that hero of the 
rescue in "Jock o' the Side" is betrayed into the hands 
of the English and taken to Carlisle. Two stanzas give 
his Good-Night and his loathing of betrayal; while the 
singer concludes, — 

" 'I'd rather be ca'd Hobie Noble 

In Carlisle, where he suffers for his faut, 
Before I were ca'd traitor Mains 

That eats and drinks of meal and maut.' " 

"Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," * as printed in the 
"Minstrelsy," was "improved" by Scott; it is a story 
of cattle-lifting, revenge, and reprisal, and is somewhat 
inferior to the preceding ballads. "Hughie Grame," 
accused of stealing the lord bishop's mare, is hanged 
for the theft — unjustly, the ballad thinks, and the 
ballad may be right. It has no other claim upon the 
reader. "The Death of Parcy Reed" tells of the laird's 

1 It should be "in" the Dodhead, as Jamie was only tenant ; "of" 
would make him proprietor. — Child, v, 249. The version lately 
recovered by Mr. Macmath shows that Scott is responsible, as was 
guessed, for the simile — 

" The Dinlay snaw was neer mair white 
Nor the lyart locks of Har den's hair," 

and other additions in describing the fight. 



BALLADS OF BATTLE 253 

treacherous murder; it is full of incremental repetition, 
has a "farewell" already cited, and in one version was 
"taken down from the chanting of an old woman" in 
Northumberland. The story, to be dated perhaps in the 
sixteenth century, still lives in local tradition. When his 
three supposed friends leave him practically defenseless 
to meet the troop that besets him, he offers the first his 
good steed, the second a yoke of oxen, the third his daugh- 
ter Jean, if they will stay and back him: and all in vain. 
Passing to the ballads of battle, 1 we find in most of 
them the traces of a minstrel and even the shadow of a 
printed book. We should feel more surprise that no great 
ballad came from the long and glorious struggle of the 
covenanters, if we did not remember a dozen other disap- 
pointments of this sort, including the late civil war in 
America and the futility of nearly all its verse. One is 
tempted to say that it has always been the small fights 
which made great poetry. Moreover, tradition herself 
is sometimes unable to preserve her children from indig- 
nities and absurdities; and parody, burlesque, incom- 
petence, have spoiled many a fine original in the process 
of oral transmission. "The Battle of Harlaw" is a ballad 
mentioned as far back as "The Complaynt of Scotland;" 
it celebrated the victory won in 1411 by Lowlanders 
against an invading Lord of the Isles. This seems to have 
been lost; but a ballad on the same fight was "obtained 
from the country people" near Aberdeen- In spite of 
some obvious corruptions, it rings well, especially in the 
1 See nos. 163, 206, 205, 202, 198. 



254 THE BALLADS 

last stanza; the tune, moreover, is said to be "wild and 

simple." — 

" Gin ony body speer at you 
For them ye took awa', 
Ye may tell their wives and baimies 
They're sleepin' at Harlaw." 

Professor Neilson points out the use of the Highland 
dialect in this ballad both for characterization and for 
comic effect; it is a conglomerate of chronicle, pathos, 
and humor. 

The covenanters, it has been said, do little for balladry; 
another sort of poem has found adequate expression for 
hearts that beat more fast over the graves of the martyrs. 
"Bothwell Bridge" has been quoted already for Earl- 
stoun's good-night. "Loudon Hill" savors of a rude and 
untuneful bard; and the same may be said of "The Battle 
of Philiphaugh," though both are traditional ballads. A 
little repetition, a touch of the picturesque, fail to redeem 
"Bonny John Seton" from mediocrity or worse. These 
all form an easy bridge by which one crosses to the 
thorough-paced minstrel ballad and the piece which 
invokes printed or written authority. "Gude Wallace" * 
comes, in no long journey, from the poem attributed to 
Blind Harry; but its patriotic tone and the discomfiture 
of the English captain would make it popular and remem- 
bered. Of the actual battle-pieces, "Flodden Field," 
preserved by Deloney, 2 is the shortest and most tradi- 
tional in tone; "the commons of England made this song," 

1 No. 157. 

2 See above, p. 12, and nos. 168, 159, 172, 174, 175, 176, 177. 



BALLADS OF BATTLE 255 

he says, "which to this day is not forgotten of many." It 
has been touched a little, one infers, and shortened here 
and there, more in repetitions than in the story; its main 
defect is that one fails to find the root of the matter in it ; 
not the ballad, but its subject gave it vogue. "Durham 
Field," with sixty-six stanzas, has a minstrel or humble 
poet behind it; he is chronological in noting that Durham, 
Crecy, and Poitiers were all fought within one month, 
and he is interesting in telling us that 

" There was welthe and welfare in mery England, 
Solaces, game and glee, 
And every man loved other well 

And the king loved good yeomanrie." 

Another minstrel sings "Musselburgh Field" in the same 
vein, but the ballad is a fragment. "Earl Bothwell" tells 
of Riccio's and Darnley's death. "The Rising in the 
North," "Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas," and 
"The Earl of Westmoreland" are chronicle ballads com- 
posed by this or that minstrel; the third of these has a 
curious addition of what Child calls "imitation of stale 
old romance" and Professor Schofield suspects it to be 
drawn from "Libeaus Desconus:" we start out with 
Nevilles and old Master Norton, and end by cutting off 
the soldan's head. 

So closes the unrefreshing catalogue, save for two 
ballads which rise from these arid foothills like peaks of 
the Sierras: "Otterburn" 1 and the "Cheviot." It is 

1 Xo. 161. There is even here a background of learned information. 
"The chronicle will not He," says stanza 35 ; and the same appeal to 
authority is found in so artificial a ballad as The Rose of England. 



256 THE BALLADS 

uncertain which of them Sidney had in mind when he 
praised "the old song of Percy and Douglas;" but, as 
Professor Child remarks, while the quality of " Otterburn " 
amply deserves such praise, the quality of "Cheviot" 
deserves it better, and for that, and no other reason, one 
assumes the latter ballad. If guessing is allowed, one 
may go straight to the passage which breathes a spirit 
as noble as Sidney's own knighthood, and must have 
delighted his soul. Douglas and Percy have been fight- 
ing manfully; an arrow comes flying along and strikes 
Douglas "in at the breast-bone:" — 

" Thorowe lyvar and longes bathe 

the sharpe arrowe ys gane, 
That neuer after in all his lyffe-days 

he spayke mo wordes but ane : 
That was, ' Fyghte ye, my myrry men, whyllys ye may, 

for my lyff-days ben gan.' 

" The Perse leanyde on his brande, 
and sawe the Duglas de ; 
He took the dede mane by the hande, 
and sayd, 'Wo ys me for the ! 

" ' To haue savyde thy lyffe, I wolde haue party de with 
my landes for years thre, 
For a better man, of hart nare of hande, 
Was nat in all the north contre.' " 

So the older version, which is called the "Hunting of the 
Cheviot." The younger and inferior version, "Chevy 
Chase," — the only one known to Addison when he ap- 
preciated it so highly in the "Spectator," calling it the 






CHEVY CHASE 257 

favorite ballad of the English people 1 and asserting it 
to have been the object of extravagant admiration on 
the part of Ben Jonson, — runs thus: — 

" With that there came an arrow keene 
out of an English bow, 
Which stroke Erie Douglas on the brest 
a deepe and deadlye blow. 

"Who never said more words than these: 
' Fight on, my merry men all ! 
For why, my life is at an end, 
lord Pearcy sees my fall.' 

"Then leaving liffe, Erie Pearcy tooke 
the dead man by the hand ; 
Who said : ' Erie Dowglas, for thy life 
wold I had lost my land ! 

" ' O Christ ! my verry hart doth bleed 
for sorrow for thy sake, 
For sure, a more redoubted knight 
mischance cold never take.' " 

This version, "written over for the broadside press," 
still good in spite of the hurdy-gurdy tone, need not be 
considered further. "Otterburn," however, "tran- 
scendently heroic ballad" as Mr. Child calls it, though 
less concentrated in effect, though it has neither dying 
speech nor victor's eulogy, and though patch- verses occur 
like "I tell you in certayne," must be placed beside the 

1 "You will not maintain that Chevy Chase is a finer poem than 
Paradise Lost ?" — "I do not know what you mean by a fine poem; but 
I will maintain that it gives a much deeper insight into the truth of 
things." "I do not know what you mean by the truth of things." — 
T. L. Peacock's Melincourt, chap. ix. 



258 THE BALLADS 

"Cheviot." The chivalry lies here in facts. Besieged 
Percy defies invading Douglas over the walls of New- 
castle, and makes a tryst to fight with him; then sends 
him a pipe of wine that he and his host may drink. On 
the next day, as battle is preparing, letters come to Percy 
bidding him delay until his father shall arrive. " Wend 
again to my lord," says Percy, in Nelson's vein, " and say 
you saw me not. My troth is pledged, and no Scot shall 
call me coward. So, archers, shoot, and minstrels, play; 
every man think on his true-love and cross himself in the 
Trinity's name: I make my vow to God this day will 
I not flee ! " Then high floats the Douglas standard, with 
its bleeding heart, high the white lion and crescent of the 
Percy; " St. Andrew! " loud shouted there," St. George !" 
here; and the fight is on. "Otterburn" should stir any 
man's blood. We heed only the English ballad; there are 
two inferior Scottish versions, with a famous stanza, — 

" ' But I have seen a dreary dream, 
Beyond the isle o' Sky; 
I saw a dead man won the fight, 
And I think that man was I,' " — 

which Mr. Child refuses to accept as traditional. Inferior 
as they are, and in part "suspicious," they have a popular, 
traditional tone and lack the broadside twang of "Chevy 
Chase" in its younger form. 

How shall one account for these two fine ballads of 
"Otterburn" and the "Cheviot"? Where are they to 
be placed ? Assuming, in spite of Mr. J. W. Hales, 1 that 

1 In a paper in his Folia Litter aria. The battle was fought August 



THE BATTLE OF OTTERBURN 259 

they describe the same actual fight, we have only to read 
Froissart's story of it to understand the fine note of 
chivalry that rings through their rough stanzas. It is the 
chivalry and the sentiment of men-at-arms, if not of lofty 
knighthood itself, rather than the work of a professional 
song-writer like Laurence Minot, who was almost a con- 
temporary of these warriors and wrote exultant verses 
on the wars of Edward III, pouring out impetuous scorn 
upon the foe. 1 It is far removed, too, from the simple and 
rural conception of things such as one can find in ordinary 
traditional ballads or even in battle-pieces made "by the 
commons." It is the spirit characteristic of fourteenth- 
century Englishmen at their best, as history records it in 
Edward III with his sacred word of honor 2 and his gen- 
erosity to the captive, as Chaucer embodies it in his 
knight and his squire, and as Shakespeare, with amazing 
sympathy, has fixed it in his Hotspur, the Percy of these 
ballads. Who knows, by the way, what the ballads may 
not have done for Shakespeare's study of this favorite, 
who, by the sneer of the rival, would " ride up a hill per- 

19, 1388. The English version of Otterburn "is likely to have been 
modernized from a ballad current as early as 1400," and is closer to the 
facts. The Cheviot, though older in its linguistic forms, is more remote 
in information ; it turns the tryst of battle in England into a defiant 
deer-hunt in Scotland. The spirit of the piece, however, is quite con- 
temporary with the fight. In form it has probably been submitted to 
many changes. 

1 See above, p. 55. 

2 This sentiment was not confined to England. The old French king, 
when his son escaped from Edward, felt bound to go of his own will over 
channel and take the hostage's place in captivity. 



260 THE BALLADS 

pendicular," and by his own account would follow honor 
beyond mortal bounds ? The noble speech before Shrews- 
bury fight, — 

" ' O gentlemen, the time of life is short,' " — 

is a kind of summary of Percy's character as the ballad- 
makers saw it. 1 

Judging them, then, by their tone, these ballads spring 
originally from fighting men of the better sort, and sug- 
gest the old songs of warriors by warriors and for warriors 
which one guesses in the background of epic. Precisely, 
too, as the nobler sort of rhapsode or professional poet 
worked old improvisations into epic shape without 
impairing their note of simple and hardy courage, so a 
border minstrel of whatever time has surely laid his hand 
upon the original form of these stirring verses. They are 
still popular, still traditional, but not in the sense that 
"Mary Hamilton " and "Captain Car" and the Scottish 
versions of "Otterburn" itself are traditional and popu- 
lar. They are epic in their appeal, particularly in their 
habit of singling out this or that hero and naming him for 
especial praise, a method which is often called Homeric 
and which is particularly effective in the best of Anglo- 
Saxon battle-lays, "The Fight at Maldon." Richard 
Witherington, squire of Northumberland, is a worthy 
successor to those heroes of East Anglia, the leader 
Byrhtnoth, iElfere, Maccus, Wulfmser, and the rest, 

1 So far is this sentiment to the fore that Hume of Godscroft (see 
Child, iii, 303) calls the Cheviot "a meer fiction, perhaps to stirre up 
vertue." 



ARTISTIC TOUCHES 261 

immortal all. Our two ballads are matched in this re- 
spect, moreover, by songs which are not of so traditional 
a cast. A verv interesting sons; on the Battle of Agin- 
court, 1 printed by Wright in the second volume of his 
u Political Poems," " is preserved in ... an early chron- 
icle of London, the writer of which was taking his narra- 
tive from the account given in the popular ballad, until, 
tired of paraphrasing it, he went on copying the song 
itself." In its praise of the individual warriors, it runs 
parallel with "Otterburn" and the i( Cheviot:" but this 
is not all. These ballads break away in several instances 
from the common metre and ordinary stanza; the same 
rime often connects two or more stanzas; and Professor 
Skeat thinks that the whole of the "Cheviot" was meant 
to run in eight-line stanzas, — as Child prints it, — and 
that either the task was too hard or our copy is badly 
damaged. Now "Agincourt" is in interlaced eight-line 
stanzas, of the ballade order, with a refrain: and Wright's 
second volume, just cited, contains a number of poems of 
this general form, all on popular subjects and tending 
to "journalism" of the better class. Such, for example, 
is the "Larnentacioun of the Duchess of Glossester," re- 
ported in the first person by one who " passed through a 
palace" and heard her moan. "All women may be ware 

1 The other song For the Victory at Agincourt. which Percy printed 
from a MS. which also contained the music, has a Latin refrain = Percy 
notes that " although Henry ' had forbidden the minstrels to celebrate his 
victory,' he was a patron of the ' order,' and both of his biographers men- 
tion his love of music." Wright says that this song "carried the tidings 
of the victory . . . through the towns and villages of England." 



THE BALLADS 

by me," is unlucky Eleanor's refrain; and there is, of 
course, no refrain line in our ballads. But the general 
resemblance is clear. Striking is the tendency to ex- 
cessive alliteration, not found in the normal traditional 
ballad in such riotous force, but breaking out here and 
there in our two border pieces so as to match the con- 
sistent habit of songs like "Agin court," with its — 

" Stedes ther stumbelyd in that stownde, 
That stod stere stuffed under stele." 

Instead of the modest "dale and down" or "green as 
grass" of balladry, we have in "Otterburn" "styffely 
in stowre can stand;" while Percy's tryst is described 
as a place where — 

"The roo full rekeles ther sche rinnes 
To make the game and glee; 
The fawken and the fesaunt both 
Among the holtes on hye." 

Douglas is painted finely in the "Cheviot," by good help 
of "hunting the letter:" — 

" His armor glytteryde as did a glede, 
a bolder barne was never born." 

These are marks of the poet, and are in line with the 
characteristics of middle-English lyric in its mingling of 
popular and artistic elements. Not that the humble 
ballad-singer, Richard Sheale, who signs the copy of the 
"Cheviot" which he had probably learned by ear and 
either dictated to a poor scribe or set down in his own 
blundering hand, made any line of the poem. He copied 
it as part of his stock, just as a more prosperous man, 



COMPOSER AND COPYIST 263 

years before, set down favorite songs in a commonplace 
book and signed, for example, "The Nut-Brown Maid" 
with his own name: "explicit quod Ric. Hill." So the 
Tarn worth minstrel wrote "expliceth, quod Ry chard 
Sheale." That should disturb nobody. Nor should the 
minstrel's rendering of a transition stanza: "The first fit 
here I end; if you want any more of this Cheviot song, 
more is coming." Not even that is Sheale's affair. Heusler 
notes that remote Faroe ballads have such a division 
with such an announcement: "here the first fit ends," or 
"here we will begin our second fit; 99 and it is common 
in medieval tales. Finally, the imperfect metre is precisely 
what one should expect from an illiterate copyist. Ballads 
sung in good rhythm are always in good metre, and in 
this respect not inferior, as Mr. Child once wrote in a 
private letter, to "any Pindaric ode by Gray or whom- 
ever else." An ignorant man sings or recites good rhythm, 
he cannot write or dictate it; just so children invariably 
observe rigorously good rhythm in saying verse, and 
will "make up" a good line or so. Let them take pencil 
and paper, try to compose and set down their lines, and 
the result is sad limping stuff. 

It is clear, then, that these two great ballads spring 
from no simple countryside memory. We hear, as in 
Froissart, the cry of heartening or of defiance, and, as 
in 'Maldon," the crash of weapons and din of actual 
fight. Contrast with this the movement and detail of the 
"Baron of Brackley;" there the persons are named 
but incidentally; everybody knows them, and they are 



264 THE BALLADS 

neither introduced nor described. The action begins at 
once. Here, though we are dealing with such a prominent 
man as Harry Percy, the epic instinct asserts itself in lines 
of introduction or detail : — 

" He had byn a march-man all hys dayes 
And kepte Barwyke upon Twede." 

The route of the invaders is carefully given, their num- 
bers, — with appeal to "the chronicle," — and the exact 
time of year by rural calendar; * whereas 

" Inverey cam doun Deeside whistlin' and playin', 
He was at brave Braikley's yett ere it was dawin'," 

is the incipient chronicle style, still communal in manner 
and form. Moreover in "Otterburn" and the " Cheviot" 
comment of the narrator is heard: "the child may rue 
that is unborn," for the general, and for the particular — 

" It was a hevy syght to se 

bright swordes on basnites lyght." 

Most striking is the absence of ballad commonplaces, 
matching the deviation from ballad structure. In the Scot- 
tish popular fragment of " Otterburn," three stanzas are 
taken from the chronicle ballad; and then enters a bonny 
boy, of the regular breed, with his news, and as inevitably 
he is told that if this be true he shall have the best, 

1 In the Cheviot there is a kind of antiquarian appeal, already quoted : 

" Old men that knowen the growende well yenoughe, 
Call it the battell of Otterburn." 

This version is therefore a strictly local redaction of the familiar chron- 
icle ballad material. 



CHRONICLE BALLADS 265 

if false he may look to be hanged ; whereupon he takes 
out his "little penknife" from its right ballad place and 
gives Earl Douglas "a deep wound and a sare," — which 
is the popular and traditional expression of a belief 
that Douglas was not killed by the enemy, but by a re- 
vengeful groom of his chamber whom he had struck 
the day before and who left part of his master's armor 
unfastened behind so as to strike him down in the heat 
of battle. 1 In the chronicle ballad, however, not a hint of 
any commonplace of typical situation ballads can be 
found. 

For these two are chronicle ballads, — with emphasis 
on the chronicle. The fight of Otterburn was surely sung 
on both sides of the border, in hall, bower, and cottage, 
by the roadside and at the dance; but what we have in 
the two splendid poems about it seems to come to us, in 
stuff and spirit, from men-at-arms, — who, as the bishop 
testifies, could make and sing their ballads readily 
enough, — with more or less editing, recasting, and fresh 
phrasing, by minstrels of varying degree, upon the way. 
That way was not very long; both ballads are in manu- 
script of the sixteenth century. They are ballads of fight, 
traditional, but not popular in the normal sense of the 
word. There is nothing choral or concerted or dramatic 
in them; they seem to have been epic from the start. 
But it is useless to speculate on their far-off and conjec- 
tural making; they are made, and, more to the purpose, 
have been kept; they are to be taken as Dryden would 
1 Hume of Godscroft, Child, iii, 295. 



266 THE BALLADS 

have men take Chaucer, and one is glad enough to say 
that here is God's plenty. 1 

VI. THE GREENWOOD BALLADS 

The epic process of balladry does not culminate in 
heroic pieces such as we have been noting. Of these, 
indeed, it may be said that except in their traditional 
ballad style, and in their compactness, their swifter and 
more irregular pace, they do not differ essentially from 
longer epic poems. Professor Ker has shown that the 
chasm between epic and heroic song is no wide, impas- 
sable affair. Still less is the difference between popular 
ballad and popular epic; and this difference can be 
studied at will in the various pieces which make up the 
Robin Hood group as compared with the Gest, an actual 
though not elaborate epic poem. 2 Its hero, of course, is 
the outlaw. 

1 The "popular" Chevy Chase of the broadsides, though it was 
worked over from traditional sources, has as little of the typical and 
traditional ballad structure as the manuscript Cheviot; but one would 
like to have heard those Scottish shepherds sing, and perhaps dance, 
their Hunttis of Chevet.. The fragment of Otterburn (B) combines bor- 
rowing of the chronicle ballad with its own popular stanzas not derived 
from the chronicle ballad ; and the line of cleavage is evident. The 
point is not only that no facts support the idea, which some critics are 
fond of advancing, that a heroic tale such as the Cheviot, told in the 
manner of romance, falls like crumbs from the knight's table among 
retainers, scullions, and begging-minstrels, who cook it again into a 
popular ballad with more or less pitiful repetition and other "slang," 
but that a convincing array of facts can be brought against this theory. 
See Kittredge, in the Cambridge ed. of Child's Ballads, pp. xv f . ; and 
the present writer, in Modern Philology, 1904. 

2 These are compared, on lines laid down by Professor Ker, in 



DETACHED OUTLAW BALLADS 267 

The outlaw, now as humble poacher and now as ideal 
champion of the rights of man against church and state, 
is a natural favorite of the ballad muse. She has little 
liking, however, for George Borrow's friend, the gypsy, 
who came into view too late for the best traditional song; 
he has just one ballad to his credit. John Faa * was a 
leading name among the gypsies; and this particular 
hero, so it seems, was hanged in Scotland about 1624. 
The ballad without warrant of fact makes the Countess 
of Cassilis leave her earl and elope with Johny Faa, 
whose people had "coost the glamer o'er her." There is 
plenty of repetition, and a thoroughly traditional style. 
Another Johnie, however, and with no trace of the 
vagrom blood, is more to our purpose. "This precious 
specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad" is Mr. 
Child's eulogy of "Johnie Cock," 2 and Professor Brandl, 
defying tradition, has undertaken to restore the original 
text of the ballad; but as a matter of fact, traditional 
ballads have no text in the ordinary meaning of the word. 
"There are texts," as Professor Kittredge says, "but 
there is no text." Old things and new jostle each other 
in "Johnie Cock;" wolves roam about, and birds give 
information, but Johnie himself, in a version taken down 
in 1780, wears not only Lincoln green, but "shoes of the 

A. Heusler's Lied und Epos, 1905, pp. 37 ft*. A volume by Professor 
W. M. Hart, soon to be published, examines the case at length and 
with interesting results. 

1 See no. 200, The Gypsy Laddie. 

2 See, for the following, nos. 114, 115, 116, 118 to 154 inclusive, and 
117, the Gest. 



268 THE BALLADS 

American leather." What Johnie does, however, is the 
same in all versions : he disregards his mother's benison 
and malison alike, her proffered wine and bread, and 
goes off to hunt the dun deer. An old palmer, or other 
informer, sees him and tells the seven foresters, who sur- 
prise him, wounding him badly, but are all killed save 
one. Johnie's indignation at the unmanly mode of attack 
is curiously expressed : — 

" 'The wildest wolf in aw this wood 
Wad not ha' done so by me ; 
She'd ha' wet her foot i' th' wan water, 

And sprinkled it o'er my bree ; 
And if that wad not ha' waken'd me, 
She wad ha' gone and let me be.' " 

It goes with a burden, this sterling old song, and has 
traces of an incremental repetition that has been reduced 
to lowest terms by impatient transcribers. But the dra- 
matic throb is still there. Burden and repetition are still 
more to the front in a very old greenwood ballad preserved 
by a manuscript of the fifteenth century. "Robyn and 
Gandelyn" is not a part of the Robin Hood cycle, though 
it has some resemblance to the type. Robyn, or Robert, 
uses his namesake's oath, and he goes with Gandelyn 
after deer as Robin goes with Little John on other quests. 
Wrennok of Donne shoots Robert from ambush, — "out 
of the west;" whereupon Gandelyn takes vengeance, 
cleaving Wrennok's heart with an arrow. — 

"'Now xalt l thou never yelpe, 1 Wrennok, 
At ale ne at wyn ; 

1 Shalt; boast. 



ADAM BELL 269 

That thu hast slawe ' goode Robyn 
And his knave 1 Gandeleyn. 

"'Now xalt thou never yelpe, Wrennok, 
At wyn ne at ale, 
That thu hast slawe goode Robyn 

And Gandeleyn his knave.' 
Robin lygth in grene wode bowndyn." 

Despite its beginning, "I herde a carpyng of a clerk," 
attributing the tale to a scholar's song, this bit of verse is 
of indirect popular origin. At beginning and end, as in 
Danish ballads, is the burden: Robin lies in greenwood 
bound ; while the incremental repetitions in so old a copy- 
are valuable evidence for its primitive structure. "Adam 
Bell" brings us to very different matter. Reprinted often, 
a regular story in one hundred and seventy stanzas, it 
has a good plot — partly used again in the ballad of 
"Auld Matrons" — and situations of absorbing interest 
such as the Tell episode where Cloudesley shoots the 
apple from his son's head. This, like other good things, 
is probably imported from abroad; to ascribe it to an 
old Aryan sun-myth is futile. These ballads all praise 
good archery; and such a story would fall into the out- 
law's doings as to a magnet. The three heroes are sworn 
brothers; and their narrative shows distinct traces of an 
arranging hand in dealing with the abundant traditional 
and popular material. It is treated very briefly here 
because arrangements of this sort, the combination and 
the interplay, are most conveniently studied in a com- 
pilation like the " Gest." Moreover, the "rescue" part of 
1 Slain; servant, squire. 



270 THE BALLADS 

"Adam Bell" is repeated in "Robin Hood and the 
Monk," one of the best ballads of its kind ever made, 
just as the surprised porter, the outwitted citizens, the 
slain sheriff, the "complacent king," and the happy end- 
ing, return not only in the better known cycle but in the 
"Gest" itself. Here, too, though in slightest compass, 
we meet the "nature introduction;" we roam with merry 
archers under the green leaves, and fleet the time in a 
style akin to Robin's own royal way. We hear the reciter, 
too, already met in the "Cheviot," with his "listen, gen- 
tlemen," and his warning of a completed "fit:" — 

" To Caerlel went these good yemen 
In a mery morning of Maye : 
Here is a fit of Cloudesli, 
And another is for to saye." 

The rhapsode has arrived. 

As we have said, the progress of heroic ballads through 
a cycle up to a coherent epic poem lies before us in its 
latter stages, although its actual beginning and its pos- 
sible end cannot be seen. "The Gest of Robin Hood" is 
an epic poem in that it tells its connected story about a 
definite hero; and it is put together, smoothed, and com- 
pleted into unity, out of sundry epic ballads which them- 
selves make a single though not a coherent group. While 
we have not the actual pieces used for the making of this 
epic, we have versions which correspond very closely to 
them. Had the "Gest" been composed in an unlettered 
age, had its hero been national as well as popular, the 
epic process would have gone on its way to higher and 



ROBIN HOOD BALLADS AND PLAYS 271 

wider achievement. Confined to humble tradition and 
the interest of a class, it reached no advanced stage, 
and can be called full epic only by the courtesy of antici- 
pation. For the other extreme of the process, there is rea- 
sonable conjecture. It would be an enormous gain to the 
science of literature if one could follow back to their be- 
ginnings, not only actual ballads of the cycle, but also that 
dramatic or even ritual treatment 1 of the theme which 
analogy with other cases forbids us to confine to such 
late, incidental, and corrupted specimens of the Robin 
Hood plays as have been preserved. Little more than the 
name comes to these from greenwood tradition; Maid 
Marian is an impertinence, mere Marion of the French 
Robin, and no mate for our outlaw. Fragments, however, 
of the true greenwood drama occur; such is the bit of a 
play, preserved in a manuscript which must be older 
than the memorandum of 1475 on its back, with plot 
similar to the story of "Robin Hood and Guy of Gis- 
borne." But the plays do little for our purpose. 

A careful study of the ballads, however, makes it rea- 
sonably sure that they were sung in the first instance about 
some local hero in the manner of "Robin and Gandelyn" 
and " Johnie Cock," but with the structure of a dramatic 
ballad of situation. 2 Overwhelming popular favor has- 

1 The May festival claims Robin for its own, and with good reason; 
but these relations belong to students of our earliest drama. 

2 The language of the Gest, which was printed near 1500, contains 
some Middle English forms which may be "relics of the ballads from 
which this little epic was made up," or else the natural language of a 
poem "put together as early as 1400 or before." See Child, iii, 40. 



272 THE BALLADS 

tened the epic course. As Arthur probably began with 
some real chieftain and formed the nucleus for innumer- 
able accretions of fiction and fact from every side, grow- 
ing into the sovran ruler of all romance as well as "the 
flower of kings," so a petty fugitive of whatever name, 
poaching on the royal preserves, may well have grown in 
fame, appropriated the legends of other fugitives, and so 
become what Professor Child has called him, the ideal 
outlaw. His character is drawn in terms of eulogy. He 
is distinctly named as one who did poor men much good; 
and poor men of the fourteenth century not only needed 
a friend, not only were ready to hail him hero, but, in 
their humble song, could save that friend and hero from 
the fate of the unrecorded brave. The author of "Piers 
Plowman " yearned for a body of knights and gentlemen 
who would protect the poor peasant, but chivalry did no- 
thing of this kind; what wonder that the generous outlaw 
should appeal to popular sympathy ? * Robin took from 
the rich and gave to the lowly, correcting sociological 
abuses, and gaining that gratitude which the klephts of 
modern Greece have won from the popular muse. A very 
pedestrian muse in our own day has taken kindly to 
bandits like Jesse James; but Robin was hero not of the 
rabble, but of the people at large, the commons of Eng- 
land in a wide, rural sense. Robin, again, is no old 
divinity, no Woden, Odin, Hooden, come upon the parish; 
he is just as he is sung, outlaw, archer, foe of the unco' 
guid and the unco' rich, the poor man's friend. Yet he is 
no humble person. He is lavishly generous, full of pride, — 



ROBIN THE IDEAL OUTLAW 273 

"Robin was a proud outlaw," runs the verse, — and of 
exquisite courtesy. He harms no woman. The laudatory 
touches are general, ideal; his "milk-white side" is 
vaguely aristocratic, and the fact that an inch of his 
body was worth a whole man reminds one of the de- 
scriptions of Beowulf's hand-grip, — strong as that of 
thirty men. In brief, the ideal outlaw, a vividly drawn 

typV 

With this theory of Robin's provenience agree such 
facts as can be gathered. The mention of him in the 
fourteenth century by an Englishman, and early in the 
fifteenth by a Scot, testifies to his vogue; and the English 
account is significant. Sloth, in "Piers Plowman," knows 
"rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf, erle of Chester." 
Identification of the rank of these two, often attempted, 
is absurd on the face of it; for the cycles differed utterly. 
Sloth evidently held at command two groups of songs, 
one of battle and feud, in which the great earl spent his 
half-century full in the public eye, and one of humbler 
origin, which was so far complete by 1377, the earliest 
date for this reference, that one may assume the "Gest" 
itself to have been made not many years later. We should 
say now that Sloth had equal liking for history and for 
romance; nor do we admit for a moment that Sloth's 
taste was in question. Probably his industrious and pious 
friend Piers, though a rank Puritan, was fond of a good 
cleanly ballad, only he did not neglect his pater-noster 
for secular song. Those two cycles, united in Sloth's 
memory, have been divided by fate. The history has 



274 THE BALLADS 

disappeared, the romance lives on. Randolf, second or 
third earl, or perhaps a compound of both, who now 
defied royalty and now made peace and pact, was at 
times an outlaw on the grand scale, and offered every 
inducement for immortality in song; but, like Hereward, 
he is for us a ballad-hero without his ballads, while 
the fortuitous Robin Hood, "absolutely a creation of the 
ballad muse," with no history to commend him, is the 
hero of an excellent epic and of thirty-six known in- 
dividual ballads, good and bad, besides those that have 
gone the way of destruction. Of the thirty-six, as Child 
points out, four are of quite ancient form: "Robin Hood 
and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and the Potter," from 
old manuscripts of the fifteenth century, "Robin Hood 
and Guy of Gisborne" and "Robin Hood's Death, " from 
the Percy Folio. The rest, mainly gathered from broad- 
sides and garlands, while popular in some respects, often 
give Robin a sorry fate, bringing him down to the stupid, 
amicable bully whom any stray tinker or tramp can 
soundly thrash, and striking, in most cases, a deplorably 
poor note. So Charlemagne declines from the all-wise 
and all-powerful hero of the earliest chansons de geste to 
the weak, vassal-ruled figure of twelfth-century accounts. 
Most of these garlands and broadsides preserve sound 
old ballad stuff in its dotage, as a bit of comparison 
will show. In the "Gest" Little John remarks to Robin 
that it is time for dinner: — 

"Than bespake hym gode Robyn : 
'To dyne have I noo lust 



ROBIN DEGENERATE 275 

Till that I have som bolde baron, 
Or som unkouth gest,' "* — 

which, as Professor Child reminds us, was King Arthur's 
way. In "Robin Hood Newly Revived" the singer calls 
on all "gentlemen in this bower" to listen to him, and 
then plunges into the dialogue as follows : — 

"'What time of the day?' quoth Robin Hood then 
Quoth Little John, "T is in the prime.' 
1 Why then we will to the green wood gang, 
For we have no vittles to dine.'" 

It is not all as deject and wretched, to be sure; but that 
is too often the tone of the late "popular" ballads. 2 A 
glance at these will suffice, nor is it even well to make a 
list of their titles. Of the good and ancient versions, how- 
ever, it may be said that nothing better of their kind can 
be found in any time or place; none, says Professor Child, 
"please so many and please so long." But they should 
not be made over in condescending prose and mixed with 
alien stuff. It is to be regretted that the original Robin 
Hood of these sterling poems, the "pious founder" him- 
self, who loves his king, though he eats the king's deer 
and shoots the king's officers, who gets uneasy if he can- 

1 " Stranger as guest." 

2 The best of these ballads of the "secondary" period is one that may 
be derived from North Country tradition, and is in the better traditional 
style, — Robin Hood and the Beggar, ii, no. 134 in Child. See his 
remarks, iii, 159. Another good ballad is no. 144, Robin Hood and the 
Bishop of Hereford, composed by somebody on the basis of the Gest, but 
well composed. Forty years ago it was the most popular Robin Hood 
ballad sung in England. 



276 THE BALLADS 

not attend church, though he exacts huge sums from the 
monks, who helps the poor everywhere and even an occa- 
sional worthy knight, who holds a kind of greenwood 
assizes, and when made an official at the king's court 
pines for his forest and the dun deer, and who has such 
a follower as Little John, should be presented to healthy 
youth along with those Maid Marians and Friar Tucks 
who have no ballad rights to existence on any terms. 
It is true that many of the inferior ballads about Robin 
Hood had their vogue ; they were often meant for singing, * 
and have a burden. The last of them, however, "A True 
Tale of Robin Hood," professing to be history, is the work 
of a known author, Martin Parker, the only poem in 
Child's collection which is not anonymous; and it is a 
dreary compilation indeed. It ends with a supposed 
epitaph from the hero's tomb in Yorkshire; and of course 
Robin is Earl of Huntington. More to the purpose are 
the broadsides and garlands, beloved of rural England; 
yet, while a few commonplaces occur in these and in- 
cremental repetition now and then is used, the com- 
monplaces are seldom apposite and the repetition rarely 
effective. Lovers of the traditional ballad have little to 
do with these broadsides, save as with studies in degen- 
eration; while the popular heroic ballad is seen at its 
best in the old and sterling pieces to which we now turn. 
Striking are the differences between this group and 
those ballads of situation which were assumed as normal 

1 For example, nos. 122, with traces of repetition, 123, 124, 125, 126, 
132, 133, 135, 143, and 150. 



THE TOUCH OF NATURE 277 

and at no great distance from choral origins. "Guy," 
"The Monk," "The Potter," are long stories, epic 
through and through. Each begins with description of the 
greenwood, with the boon season and the singing birds. 
Like the conventional May morn of so many poems, this 
descriptive opening — it is echoed with variations as 
overture to the Canterbury Tales — is supposed to have 
been brought into vogue by medieval Latin poets, 
although it seems more probable that these poets were 
themselves inspired by choral summer songs of the folk. 
But it is not an original traditional ballad affair; it 
belongs both to pure lyric, like that old Provencal song 
of the regine AvriUouse, and to these incipient epics of the 
greenwood. Least meritorious of the four, "The Potter" 
has the shortest and barest opening ; and "Guy," 
though admirable, is just a trifle too abrupt. When 
shaws are sheen and copses fair, we are told, and leaves 
large and long, it is merry to hear the small birds singing 
in the forest. Then the tense shifts : — 

" The woodweele sang and wold not cease 
Amongst the leaves a lyne; 1 
And it is by two wight yeomen, 
By deare God, that I meane." 

And the story can begin. "The Monk," however, most 
successful of these pieces, while opening in the same 
way, has its conventional material under better artistic 
control, runs more smoothly, and joins its scene very 
prettily with its story. These beginning stanzas are 
1 Linden leaves. 



278 THE BALLADS 

already classic, — if by "classic" one means the best 
things in a literature : — 

"In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, 
And leves be large and long, 
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste 
To here the foulys song : 

"To se the dere draw to the dale, 
And leve the hilles hee, 
And shadow hem in the leves grene, 
Under the grene- wode tre. 1 

" Hit befel on Whitsontide, 
Erly in a May mornyng, 
The son up feyre can shyne, 
And the briddis mery can syng. 

" ' This is a mery mornyng,' seid Litull John, 
' Be hym that dyed on tre ; 
A more mery man then I am one 
Lyves not in Christiante. 

" * Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster,' 
Litull John can sey, 
'And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme 
In a mornyng of May.' " 

Here the epic opening, itself an accretion upon the old 
dramatic and choral ballad, is provided with an intro- 
duction beautiful for purposes of art, but superfluous in a 
song made up wholly of action and dialogue. Dominance 
of actual situation over description and story comes more 
into view in "Robin Hood's Death," which opens with 

1 The late Dr. Boynton, in an unpublished dissertation on ballad 
refrains, copy in Harvard College Library, pp. 237 f., thinks that this 
opening was once a true burden-stem such as one often finds at the 
beginning of Danish ballads. 



ROBIN HOOD'S DEATH 279 

a dialogue and makes no mention of time or place. Robin 
is ill; he must go to Churchlees and be let blood. Danger 
from a yeoman there is urged ; let Robin take a sufficient 
bodyguard. He will take only Little John. They shoot as 
they go, and pass a black water with a plank over it where 
kneels an old woman banning Robin Hood; her reasons 
are lost with a lost leaf of the Percy Folio. Doubtless, as 
Child says, she is a hired witch; and presently there are 
women weeping for Robin's "dear body that this day 
must be let blood." Omens are in the air, but Robin fears 
not; dame-prior is his kin. The catastrophe is effective 
enough; and the singer makes boding comment as Robin 
rolls up his sleeve and the prioress prepares her blood- 
irons. — 

" I hold him but an unwise man 
That will noe warning leeve." 

The blood-irons are laid on; a familiar stanza, common- 
place indeed, begins but is not finished, — for here at the 
end, whatever the opening verses, is no mood for lingering 
repetition, choral devices, or dramatic effect, but a plain 
story to tell : — 

" And first it bled, the thicke, thicke blood, 
And afterwards the thinne, 
And well then wist good Robin Hoode 
Treason there was within . . ." 1 

The "Babylon" ballad would have made us infer all 

this. Then there is a struggle with one Red Roger, lover 

1 One expects : — 

" And syne came out the bonny heart's blood; 
There was nae mair within," 

as in Sir Hugh, and elsewhere; but Robin is not dead yet, and the singer 
is wary. 



280 THE BALLADS 

of the prioress, and Robin's foe; but though Red Roger 
wounds the weakened man, he gets swift death from 
him and a farewell of scorn. Dying, Robin calls for the 
last sacrament, forbids Little John to "burn up all 
Churchlee," lest "some widow" should be hurt and just 
blame come of it. " But take me on thy back, Little John ; 
make me a fair grave; set my sword at my head, arrows 
at my feet, and my yew-bow by my side. . . ." 

The rest is silence or disorder; * for the few missing 
verses can have done nothing more. The interest of this 
fine ballad, compared with other traditional verse, lies in 
its simple but appropriate art. Short as it is, it differs in 
quality from the dramatic and normal type. It has really 
but one situation, and approaches the scene individable, 
— but by a long and detailed introduction ; its structure 
is narrative throughout. In the other old ballads, of 
course, there can be no talk of a situation ; they are story, 
and good story, from end to end. "Guy" abounds in 
alliterative and proverbial phrases; but, like all these bal- 
lads, shuns incremental repetition — save for one faint 
echo — as a useless, outworn art. There is comment on 
the story; and Professor Child finds a curious parallel 
with Byron's lines in "Childe Harold" when one reads 
that he who "had been neither kith nor kin" would have 
enjoyed the sight of Robin's long duel with Sir Guy, — 
a touch of the reflective note common to all artistic 

1 No details are given at the end of the Gest. Robin is betrayed to 
death by the prioress and Syr Roger of Donkestere. The prayer for 
Robin's soul which concludes the Gest may well have ended the ballad. 



GUY AND THE MONK 281 

poems. This fight is described in more detail than is 
usual. The "two hours" limit is observed; the inevit- 
able shrewd thrust of the victim is recorded, which is 
followed by the victor's final blow, the "ackwarde 
stroke," but it is explained here that Robin "was reck- 
less on a root," stumbled, and so exposed himself. All 
ballad readers know that in "Sir Guy" Robin, dressed 
in the slain knight's horse-hide weeds, fools the sheriff 
of Nottingham and releases Little John, who kills that 
luckless official in the last stanza. In "The Monk," 
Robin quarrels w T ith Little John on the way to church, 
strikes him, and is left to go alone; at mass a great- 
headed monk ("I pray to God, woe be he!" ejaculates 
the singer) betrays Robin to the sheriff, and the outlaws 
presently hear sad news. Robin is in a dungeon, awaiting 
the king's order for execution. But Little John and Much 
slay the messenger monk and take his letters to the king. 
"Where is this monk?" — "He died on the way," says 
Little John simply. Humor, by the bye, begins to lift 
its head in this ballad, and increases in the "Gest." * 
Armed with the king's seal, John and Much go to Not- 
tingham; and again, "Where is the monk?" asks the 
sheriff. "The king," replies John, "has created him 
abbot of Westminster." After the sheriff has been made 
drunk w T ith wine and ale, the pair unbind Robin and 
escape with him to merry Sherwood. "There," says 
John, " I have done thee a good turn. Farewell and have 

1 Mainly there as humor of the situation, not of character, or, as 
here, of phrase. 



282 THE BALLADS 

good day!" "Nay," says Robin, "be master of my men 
and me!" — "Only thy fellow," answers John; and the 
quarrel is mended nobly. The king's remarks when he 
hears of the trick are delightful. " Little John has beguiled 
both me and the sheriff. And I gave those fellows good 
money, and safe-conduct! — Well, he is true to his 
master. . . . 

" * SpeJce no more of this matter, 9 seid oure kyng, 
'But John has begyled us alle.' " * 

The poet of the "Gest " does not go much beyond the 
art of these ballads, versions of which he works into his 

1 There is noticeable in this passage (at stt. 86-87) a tendency, 
obvious for reciters and singers of long ballads, and common in Scandi- 
navian pieces, to repeat from one stanza into another. It occurs in the 
border-ballads (Dick o' the Cow, 22-23, 26-27, and other cases), in Guy 
(36-37), elsewhere in the Monk (77-78), and frequently in the Gest (24- 
25; 156-157; etc.). For an example, Little John says in the Monk : — 

*" I have done thee a gode turne for an evill, 
Quyte the whan thou may. 

1 1 have done thee a gode turne ' said Litull John, 
Ffor sothe as I you say.' " 

There is one case of incremental repetition in the Gest (57-58), but it is 
for emphasis, and not the conventional kind. The favorite form of repe- 
tition in which the Gest agrees with balladry at large, and even with 
writers like Layamon (Fehr, Formelhafte Elemente in den alten Eng- 
lischen Balladen, p. 47), is the epic repetition, not without value for 
reciters: " They looked east, they looked west," Gest, 20, is like " Some- 
times she sank and sometymes she swam " in The Twa Sisters. Com- 
monplaces, moreover, must be sundered from current phrases like 
"Glasgerryon swore a full great othe," repeated in the Gest st. 110. It 
is to be wished that these "formal elements" could be studied, and not 
simply catalogued as in Fehr's dissertation. Even his comparison with 
old Germanic formulas is not worked out. 



THE ART OF THE GEST 283 

little epic. 1 Eight "fits" tell his story, in four hundred 
and fifty-odd quatrains and less than two thousand lines. 
No story was ever told to better purpose, and with better 
skill ; the pace is not strenuous; and all tragic suggestions 
are banned. A touch of the pathetic, natural as breath- 
ing, is Robin's homesickness at Edward's court; but 
the rebound is quick when the outlaw fools his king for 
a seven days' furlough, reaches greenwood, hears the 
"small notes" of merry birds, and "lists a little for to 
shoot at the dun deer." No tragic use is made of Robin's 
betrayal and death; five stanzas compress the long story 
of the separate ballad, and the close is a simple prayer' for 
the soul of a "good outlaw" who "did poor men much 
good." Robin's deeds and not his death interest our poet. 
His most successful work is in the story of Robin's loan 
to Sir Richard on the security of Our Lady, and the 
involuntary payment of the loan by a monk of St. Mary's 
abbey. The dialogue is easy and straightforward, 
advancing the action naturally; intervals are bridged by 
a stanza or so of explanation ; and there is hardly a trace 
of the alternate leaping and lingering, familiar in the 
normal ballad. The ballad commonplaces are absolutely 
wanting; though a few standing "epic phrases" recur as 
mere connectives, and there are patch- verses — "without 

1 Johnson's ridicule of ballads was only one of his friendly growls. 
He had to dust Percy's jacket once or twice ; but really he liked the 
things. He refers twice to Johnny Armstrong, and quotes it once (Hill's 
BoswelL v, 43); while of Ossian he says (ibid, v, 164, 389) that "it is 
no better than such an epic poem as he could make from the song of 
Robin Hood." 



284 THE BALLADS 

any leasynge" — like the phrases in "Otterburn." The 
whole story of the " Gest," while told in the simplest man- 
ner and in the normal ballad measure, is quite free from 
complications and repetitions of the ballad structure, 
from all choral clogs, and is a precious specimen of epic 
development on lines closer to the primitive and unlet- 
tered course than can be shown in any literature of any 
time. A poet is behind this story, not an improvising 
throng, not even, as in the case of ballads like "Babylon," 
a series of singers who derive in longer or shorter reaches 
of tradition from an improvising throng; but the poet is 
quite unsophisticated, and his art, even in its half-per- 
sonal comment on the course of events, is only a con- 
scious application of the simple objective epic process by 
which the original ballads came to their best estate. 

The fact of evolution, not in any wise a theory, con- 
fronts the student of ballads from their palpably choral, 
dramatic, iterating, intensifying, momentary state up to 
this narrative perfection of the "Gest." Facing these 
differences, not only must he regard this body of ballads 
as heterogeneous, incapable of comprehensive defini- 
tion in any other terms than those of origin ; not only 
must he divide them into several classes; he must also 
admit that these classes fall into logical if not chrono- 
logical order of development, and that this order of 
development is a traditional epic process working upon 
material made at a primitive stage not quite within our 
sight, but well within our sure inference, by the choral 
throng, the "people," and not by the individual poet. A 



FROM ORIGINS TO EPIC 285 

review of the foregoing long account of actual English 
balladry, here brought to a close, will surely commend 
this reasonable view of ballad origins; and the study of 
ballad structure, even mere comparison of early stages in 
a "Babylon," a "Maid Freed from the Gallows," with 
later stages in the Robin Hood cycle, ought to place this 
view beyond denial. It is the definition by origins, with- 
out which there can be no really permanent division of 
English literature under the head of Popular Ballads. 




CHAPTER III 

TBE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

R. JOHNSON, whom we have just re- 
claimed as a lover of ballads, made merry- 
over the new historical and comparative 
school of his day. "Hurd, sir," he remarked, 
"is one of a set of men who account for everything 
systematically;" and he instanced "scarlet breeches" as 
a problem not too trivial for Hurd's study of origins. 
Now the main source of ballads cannot be revealed by 
any system; for oral tradition is not a systematic affair. 
It is unwritten, unrecorded, capricious in its final favors, 
the very shadow of chance. Tenacious enough, not 
without instinct for the best, it runs a fairly straight 
course in its own way; but, when pursued by the tran- 
scriber and collector, it grows self-conscious or else 
disappears from sight. We can study it in survivals; 
occasionally it can be spied in remote lands by the stu- 
dent of ethnology; but for English and Scottish sources 
we know it only in its last, uncertain stage, and even 
that is now at an end. What the old collectors gleaned 
from their autumnal field, however, and what one can 
still learn from analogous processes among remote and 
isolated communities throughout the uncivilized world, 
are ample warrant for the assertion of tradition's an- 



THE TRADITIONAL PROCESS 287 

cient pride of power. Tradition, which could make 
no literary form, and simply accepted the ballad as its 
rhythmic expression, modified that form to suit epic needs, 
and made the various ballads as we have them. We 
must sunder here, as elsewhere, ballads from the ballad. 

The impersonal character of our ballads * is largely 
the work of this traditional process. The ballad itself, 
the original choral and dramatic type, fairly well pre- 
served in "The Maid Freed from the Gallow 7 s," derived 
its impersonal note from the choral fact, from the con- 
sent of many voices, and from the dominance of dramatic 
interest, so that even individual improvisation was ob- 
jective in everyway; but there was quite another influ- 
ence at work in the slow transmission of a given piece 
from generation to generation of communal memory. It 
is not simply the changes from stage to stage, not simply 
the local variations, though these are interesting enough 
in the study of a ballad in many versions; it is the effacing 
fingers of tradition herself which sweep gradually aw r ay 
a hundred original marks and make, in course of time, a 
new impersonality, a new objectivity. By the old logical 
phrase, the ballad gets objectivity in intension from its 
origins and condition of form, while the actual and sepa- 
rate ballads get objectivity in extension from successive 
stages of the traditional process. 2 

So much for tradition as motive-power of the ballads. 

1 See also above, p. 66. 

2 See Professor Kittredge's study of this process in the one- volume ed. 
of Child's Ballads, p. xvii. 



288 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

What, however, of their material, and of the sources 
whence it derives? Apart from this great background 
of balladry, this enveloping and necessary atmosphere of 
it and its condition of existence, whence come the ballads 
as they stand ? Their sources, to be sure, have been to 
some extent indicated in the previous chapter. We have 
seen the rare ballad of literary origins, so far as its narra- 
tive is concerned, taken into the traditional fold; now it 
changes its setting, as in "Bonnie Annie" and "Brown 
Robyn," — if these be really derived from the story of 
Jonah, — and now, as in the "Judas" group, it holds 
to its original character and place. We have seen the 
chronicle ballad, based on fact, now in the immediate 
epic style of "Otterburn," and now more traditionally 
vague, remote, and full of the incremental manner, as in 
"Mary Hamilton" and "Captain Car." From this tradi- 
tional fact one passes easily through legend, with vague 
and varying names and uncertain locality, to almost 
wholly dramatic pieces of situation, where the names 
mean nothing at all, as in "Babylon," or are left out, as 
in the old riddle ballads. 

But there are wider reaches to consider. Stories, parts 
of stories, episodes, and situations, which are found in 
our versions, are also found in the Scandinavian, the 
German, the French, and even in popular literature of 
eastern and southern Europe. Remoter parallels occur. 
How, then, is all this to be explained ? Have we borrowed 
from our neighbors ? Or are they and we using a common 
European or Aryan fund of popular tradition? Or 



THE PROBLEM OF SOURCES 289 

thirdly, as Mr. Andrew Lang has urged, is there in many 
places spontaneous and independent production of similar 
narratives ? Each of these three explanations is reasonable 
in itself, and should be tested for the particular case; the 
mistake is to demand that one of them must explain bal- 
ladry at large. The first is easiest to apply, but needs close 
study of facts; hence it is the favorite method of com- 
parative literature to-day, and has grown contemptuous 
of its rivals. Yet one may venture the assertion that even 
this debit-and-credit theory shows signs of fatigue from 
overwork. The second explanation, though at one time 
defended warmly by Gaston Paris, suffers rather from 
inactivity. That "common fund of Aryan popular tradi- 
tion " has no very sure rating in these times; it is involved 
in the bankruptcy, as some view it, of the Primitive 
Aryan's estate, his residence, myths, — library, one might 
put it, — and household goods. His very plow has been 
seized. The theory of mutual borrowing is certainly a 
nearer way for the student of ballad-material than as- 
sumptions of common descent and the Aryan patrimony. 
It appeals to sensible minds and general experience. 
All the world thrives by credit, and private life is said 
to be merriest on such a base: Borgt der Wirth nicht, 
borgt die Wirthin; und am Ende borgt die Magd. Yet one 
does yearn now and then, in a gross way, for sight of 
grains or minerals as they wave on their native fields or 
come unstamped, un worked from the mine; trade pre- 
supposes production; and one tires of a perpetual adjust- 
ment of the books of borrowing unlimited, and of no- 



290 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

thing original from end to end of the subject. The east 
is vaguely indicated as starting-point in this series of 
literary credits; but it is too far a cry from the present 
point of investigation. And the theory proves too much. 
Even as M. Cosquin, in his "Contes Populaires de Lor- 
raine," justly derided the "vague vapoureux et poetique" 
of the Grimms, so M. Bedier, in "Les Fabliaux," has 
quite as justly derided M. Cosquin's tendency to see in 
every story, anecdote, plot, something "come from the 
east in the wake of the crusades." And here, surely, is 
reason for at least a respectful hearing of Mr. Lang's 
explanation. We have said in a previous chapter that 
some few primary instincts of humanity, crossing some 
few tendencies of mortal life, inevitable clashings of fate 
with the heart of man, might well result in action and 
suffering, in deeds and events, that could pass directly 
into song without taking that oriental route. Surely, by 
M. Bedier's showing there is room for a little spontaneity 
here and there in the way of popular song, for a little 
home production and a few native wares! Surely as with 
jest and plot and popular tale, so with ballads. No one 
denies the borrowing. Where the story or episode is so 
striking, so crossed or complicated in motive, as to put 
spontaneous suggestion from daily life and ordinary hu- 
man passion out of the case, and where, moreover, this 
story or episode, reproduced with fair exactness from bal- 
lad to ballad, agrees in names as well as facts with some 
definite narrative of long standing and fame, then the ulti- 
mate borrowing is certain, and the explanation of patent 



THEORIES OF TRANSMISSION 291 

agreement in the ballads lies between farther borrowing 
or derivation from a common source, — not the Aryan or 
European stock, but let us say an older ballad from which 
the others copy. There is no doubt that the Shetland 
ballad of "King Orfeo" comes from its classical source 
through the medium of a popular tale or of another bal- 
lad. Oftener the borrowing is partial. We have seen how 
widespread was the habit of singing riddle ballads at the 
dance. How this riddle ballad itself began, whether it 
was "invented "somewhere and passed from land to land, 
or whether, like its close relative the flyting, it was devel- 
oped out of conditions common to our humanity at cer- 
tain stages of culture, is a question not to be asked in this 
place; but it is clear that a definite and particularly clever 
riddle, like a good story, would be carried about, used, 
transmitted, and so appear in ballads of many climes and 
times. "Impossible things" would have the same fate; 
this or that impossible thing, demanded by elf or maid, 
appears in the German and the English ballad and 
certainly is a case either of borrowing or of derivation 
from a common ballad source. This for the riddles; but 
an epic process makes capital of one's desire to know 
all about the person who guesses them, and hence rise 
the widespread and various stories properly grouped by 
the student of such matters as "The Clever Lass" or the 
"Wise Daughter "division; and these of course are eagerly 
borrowed everywhere. On the other hand, the asking of 
riddles at a dance, combined with choral and dramatic 
features, is not necessarily a borrowing or a derivation, 



292 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS, 

any more than singing and dancing of a given people 
needed to be imported from abroad. Speaking in a gen- 
eral way, and repeating the conclusions gained from a 
study of ballad structure, we may regard all particularly 
epic material, when not based on a historical or local and 
legendary event, as mainly borrowed or derived in our 
English and Scottish ballads, while the dramatic material, 
the "action" of the choral throng, the situation which 
appealed to those improvising singers, and even that 
complication of kinship or of social relations which gives 
motive to so many of the old ballads, must be left in good 
part to the original side of the account. To be sure, a 
good story might be used for choral purposes, just as a 
good situation was developed into epic ; but the original 
and main division is a fair one. Inasmuch, however, as 
our ballads have all advanced well out of the choral and 
improvising stage, and in the majority of cases are dis- 
tinctly epic, insisting upon the narrative, it is clear that 
epic interests will always fill the foreground in the study 
of individual ballads, and the points of contact with 
kindred pieces in other European tongues will first claim 
study and explanation. Great erudition, a nice sense of 
proportion, and the instinct for right paths are impera- 
tively needed in this work; for many a day the student 
will content himself with the splendid comparative studies 
made by Professor Child in his various introductions, or 
at best with a detail or two added, a statement here and 
there modified or withdrawn. To these introductions the 
reader should turn who wishes to know how far the narra- 



DISTRIBUTION OF GERMANIC BALLADS 293 

tive of our ballads repeats or slightly varies the narrative 
in ballads of the continent. Meanwhile Grundtvig thus 
sums up the community of Germanic ballads. 1 They are 
not found anywhere in their original form and original 
extent; but they can be traced in Denmark, Norway, 
Sweden, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Scotland, England, 
the Netherlands, and Germany. Of Scandinavian bal- 
lads, a larger number can be found in English and Scottish 
versions than in German and Dutch. England and Scot- 
land preserved none of the old heroic lays which are so 
plentiful in Scandinavia, and w T hich in Germany, though 
unknown to the ballad, have been worked into national 
epic. Mythic stuff is scant in England, unknown in Ger- 
many, but plentiful in Scandinavia. So far as oral tradi- 
tion goes, the Faroes and Norway have kept the most and 
the best; but Denmark has manuscripts, three or four 
centuries old, of traditional ballads. 

It is clear that ways of accounting for these facts will 
differ; but the facts are there. For derivation many 
scholars would substitute transmission, and would 
assume a system of exchange far beyond Germanic 
boundaries. The matter is not to be discussed here in any 
such range of the literary world; but something may be 
learned from a study of the English ballads themselves. 2 

From the nature of the case, it is clear that certain inci- 

1 In his Introduction to Rosa Warrens's Danische Volkslieder. 

2 It is worth while to point out, with the aid of Professor Herford's 
admirable Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in 
the Sixteenth Century, that while "wonderful strange news from Ger- 
many," reports of battles, stories of murders or monstrosities, what not, 



294 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

dents, complications, an unusual outcome of the usual, 
would drift about and find a subordinate place in ballads 
of many lands. These incidents, again, fall into two 
classes, one general, such as the "recognition" incident, 
which may be said to belong to the world's common 
stock, and one particular, such as the test by which recog- 
nition occurs, in "Child Maurice," by sending of mantle 
and ring; in "Hind Horn," by the magical information 
of a keepsake. These particular incidents are naturally 
copied from a definite source, and are not, so to speak, 
floating in the ballad air. 1 Again, there is the accused 
queen or wife, and her rescue by some David of a cham- 
pion, even by a child, from an all-powerful accuser; how 
widely this story is spread, how it stands with legend, 
romance, history, custom, how its details now vary and 
now agree, how the English ballad matches the Scandi- 
navian, and how it differs, may be learned from the 
respective introductory studies. 2 Conclusions are not 

came over at that time for the journalistic ballad press, nothing of Ger- 
many's heroic legend, its abounding folk song and really popular lyric, 
crossed the sea. Heroes of magic and their tales of horror, Faustus and 
Paracelsus, were eagerly welcomed in England; but nothing was desired 
of the old saga and myth still current among common folk. An actual 
ballad in German on the defeat of the Turks in 1593 was entered in the 
Stationers' Register for that September. On the spread of popular 
tales by the agency of Jews, see L. Wiener, Yiddish Literature, pp. 25 f . 

1 Information given by live birds, combined with the virtue of rings 
and other ornaments, may have begotten this idea of the silver larks. 
For tests of chastity, see the long list in Child's Index, v, 472 f. The 
ingenuity of these presupposes a literary or epic source in nearly every 
instance. 

2 See no. 59. 



COINCIDENCE AND DERIVATION 295 

uniformly sure. Coincidence and derivation are always 
scuffling in the world of letters, and it is now and then a 
nice matter to decide which is in the right. If in several 
ballads a man or maid feigns death to come near the 
beloved, one scents a "good story" and allows borrowing 
or community forthwith. But it is dangerous to run down 
too broad a trail with particular and narrow purpose. 
There is a brave group of tragic poems, dramas, episodes, 
in which the conflict of two duties springing from kinship 
gives at once the initial motive and the last throb of agony. 
What, however, have Orestes and Hamlet and Rodrigue, 
and even Riideger in the "Nibelungen," and those two 
Cumberland boys in our ballad, 1 to do with any common 
auditing of accounts in literary bookkeeping ? They 
belong to the clash of human lives and passions with inex- 
orable fate, and there an end. One warning will suffice. 
Simrock grouped the Tristram story, Romeo and Juliet, 
and Pyramus and Thisbe, as a single narrative springing 
from the notion of hindrance to true love. They are 
" hindrance" stories. The hindrance, as other details 
gather about the different versions, splits into three; in 
Tristram it is a husband, in Romeo and Juliet it is a 
family feud, in Pyramus and Thisbe it is a wall; but 
there, says Simrock, is still the same story in these 
separate guises. Whoso wishes to follow this process 
with ballads has a lifetime of exhilarating work before 
him. He can trace analogies as remote as the feigned 
madness of Hamlet as told by 5axo, and the feigned 
1 Bewick and Graham. 



296 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

idiocy of Brutus as told by Livy, handily converted into 
the same theme for a student of Shakespeare's sources. 
"Bewick and Graham," by this reckoning, is the last of 
its line, a beggar in ragged cloak, but descended from 
them of Pelops and the sceptred pall, — that is, if the 
plot and the kin-tragedy are impossible as outcome of 
conditions of English life three centuries or more ago. 
Mr. Hardy has found in our own day tragedies of iEschy- 
lean keenness; but they were not of iEschylean source. 
What shall one assert, for example, about the "relative- 
climax," say in the situation of "The Maid Freed from 
the Gallows"? Reasonably, this: a widespread group of 
ballads presents the common trait that a girl in dire 
stress appeals vainly to one relative after the other, and 
finally gets her salvation, at whatever cost, from the 
nearest and dearest. As a situation, developed under 
different conditions in choral song, there is nothing here 
that could not occur in isolated communities everywhere 
without hint or help from foreign sources. Where, how- 
ever, there is identity between different ballads in sundry 
epic details, in the development of this situation along 
certain lines, — for example, the fact of the gallows, the 
judge, and so on, — then it is folly to set aside so obvious 
a solution as common derivation from a parent ballad, 
the case of the American "Hangman's Tree," and the 
borrowing of striking narrative details from other ballads 
or from epic material however transmitted. Again, the 
excuses for John's absence in the "Twa Brothers" are 
the same in kind and series, but differ in details, from one 



COINCIDENCE AND DERIVATION 297 

version to the other; they are clearly the same ballad. 
Where difference in detail ceases and difference of origin 
begins is often hard to decide. In many cases Professor 
Child has worked out these perplexing relations with 
wonderful accuracy and success; his sturdy common 
sense, too, went hand in hand with his exquisite literary 
tact, his technical knowledge, so as to play the iconoclast 
at need, and to strew the way here and there with such 
wrecks as the Woden theory of Robin Hood and the 
celestial origins of William of Cloudesley. The more one 
can learn of a given ballad the better, no matter how 
wide and far its affiliations may go; but that caution of 
Mullenhoff needs to be kept well in sight. Every song, 
he said, every tale, legend, myth, must be studied pri- 
marily on its own ground in its own local associations. 
Grant that the home-plot has had its proper yield; 
grant that human nature, and the spontaneity of utter- 
ance in stress of a common emotion which leads to 
common expression, must both find their account in 
any theory of poetry before books ; and no quarrel 
need arise in the literary world between harvest-field and 
warehouse. 

Borrowing, derivation, even coincidence itself, are not 
always applicable terms for the analogous traits of bal- 
ladry in different countries. Earl Brand, it is true, looks 
very like a corruption of the Scandinavian Hildebrand, 
and we doubtless are here on the trail of a loan; so, too, 
with the identity of replies in Danish and English ver- 
sions, "She is my sick sister;" but because ladies both 



THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

in Norland and in Scottish parts are discovered in their 
bowers "sewing the silken seam," we should not jump 
to a like conclusion. Ballad commonplaces, idea and 
expression, belong to tradition at large. Ghost and fairy, 
too, traveled the high road in those days, and there is no 
need of tracking them to private haunts. Transformation 
is a favorite theme of folklore; in "Tarn Lane," which 
Burns surely did not invent, one finds belief in the 
recovery of lost mortal shape by means of some kind of 
dipping, whether in water or milk or what not. In "The 
Great Silkie," interchange of seal and man is a quite 
local affair. The main idea, change of shape itself, leads 
far, and carries one up to the highest type of poetic myth 
as well as down to the simplest and rudest narrative told 
by Uncle Remus himself. Romantically treated, it reaches 
the group represented by the Wife of Bath's Tale in 
Chaucer, and by a few ballads on the same general theme. 
Here, of course, is a particular case. General notions of 
this kind point to no specific source for a given ballad 
unless its details go beyond the general notion involved, 
as, in "Kemp Owyne," with the three kisses and the 
three gifts. So it is with the idea that birds talk, warn a 
criminal, and give damaging information, as they do in 
"Young Hunting," or act as occasional penny-post with 
the "Gay Goshawk," or carry grave news in "Johnie 
Cock." Curious old ideas prevail about behavior on oc- 
casions such as childbirth and funeral. Minor supersti- 
tions abound which are derived from a lapsed mythology 
and a superseded habit of dealing with the other world. 



ANCIENT CUSTOMS 299 

A few of these "remaines of gentilisme " * may be worth 
remark. It is interesting to note that Aubrey holds the 
civil wars of his day mainly responsible for the van- 
ishing of old superstition from England; as he says 
quaintly, "no suffimen is a greater fugator of phantosmes 
than gunpowder." But if supernatural ballads of our 
tongue have been lamentably lost in tradition, bits of 
demonology and ghost-lore are scattered about the sur- 
viving versions. Some are not "gentile," only old, like 
the custom of casting lots to discover a guilty person on 
shipboard, the gift of the arm-rings in "King Estmere," 
and the habit noted there of warriors who ride their 
horses into hall. The comitatus, old Germanic league of 
chief and liegemen in mutual bond until death and 
beyond it, the superb note of "Maldon Fight" and the 
Beowulf, is not specifically mentioned by ballads, but 
has left its mark in the fidelity of Border clansmen, as in 
"Jock o' the Side," in the Robin Hood group, and of 
course in that "poor squire of land" who will not look on 
while his captain fights in "Cheviot." Sworn-brotherhood 
flames up nobly for its last effort in "Bewick and Gra- 
ham;" although we must remember that the three heroes 
of "Adam Bell" had "sworn them brethren upon a day." 
The ordeal is met in various forms, — fire in "Young 
Hunting," for example, as well as battle in " Sir Aldingar ; " 
while the trail of once fiery heathen oaths moves harm- 

1 Aubrey intended to collect more than remains. "Get the song 
which is sung in the ox-house where they wassell the oxen," he notes. 
Remains of Gentilisme and Judaism, p. 9. 



300 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

lessly over the ballads in Glasgerion's famous "oak and 
ash and thorn" and the incremental stanzas in which 
Young Hunting's mistress will clear herself, — now, 
"turning right and round about," by the corn, and again, 
with the same contortion, by the moon. In another ver- 
sion, it is "by the grass sae greene" and "by the corn." 
In the "Twa Magicians" the lady swears "by the mold," 
a heathen oath like the appeal in Anglo-Saxon charms 
to mother earth, and loses; while our crafty blacksmith 
swears "by the Mass," and wins. A commonplace line, 
"The king looked over his left shoulder," is referred by 
Child l to superstitious origins; possibly, as used in "Sir 
Andrew Barton" and elsewhere, it refers to some such 
custom at court as makes the master of ceremonies under 
Hrothgar, in the Beowulf, take stand for messages at his 
monarch's shoulder. This as it may be. A very poor and 
suspicious ballad 2 preserves the curious old custom of 
giving an injured, forced, or unequally mated woman the 
choice of sword or spindle; she could take the sword, 
slay the man, and so get her freedom, or she could take 
the spindle and accept her lot. Here it is ring for spindle, 
— whether "to stick him wi' the brand or wed him wi' the 
ring." Lady Maisry "minded" thrice to the brand; but 
of course "took up the ring; " and all the ladies who heard 
of it said she was wise. A corpse betrays the murderer by 

1 See v, 286. 

2 No. 268. One archaic feature of the ballads is the prominence 
given to a sister's son; see the present writer's essay, named above, 
p. 182, note. 



FOLKLORE IN THE BALLADS 301 

beginning to bleed, and similar prodigies happen repeat- 
edly; most interesting is the "singing bone" in the "Twa 
Sisters." Dreams are not very frequent; Douglas's 
"second sight," Earl Richard's dream, which bodes only 
flight, not death, Robin Hood's vision of disgrace, and 
the chamber full of swine, the bed full of blood, may be 
cited here. When a man dies, — in a late ballad, this, — 
his horses go wild and his hounds lie howling on the leash. 
Apparitions are fairly common; the ghost has been dis- 
cussed already, but the elfin knight's horn should be 
heard, seductive as that gift of Oberon; and at least a 
touch of the uncanny is in that warning when Lord 
Barnard's horn sounds "away!" in Musgrave's ears. 
Before shipwreck there rises to the sailors' gaze a mermaid 1 
with comb and glass, now silent, a mere sign, and now 
vocal with the true siren's taunt: — 

" 'Here's a health to you, my merrie young men, 
For you never will see dry land.' " 

Another sign of shipwreck or storm is the new moon late 

in the evening, — quite sufficient as portent without an 

auld moon in her arm. Dealings with the other world 

have been already recorded; though we may note that 

Tom Potts, serving-man as he is, could be a "phisityan" 

at need; "he clapt his hand upon the wound," we are 

told, and "with some kind of words stauncht the blood." 

Sleep can be produced by charms; the venerable runes 

are still potent in this article, though they are mainly 

rationalized, just as Peter Buchan makes all his com- 

1 No. 289, A, 2; 58, J, 18. 



THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

municative birds into parrots. Stroking troth on a wand 

has been noted in "Sweet William's Ghost;" it recurs 

in " The Brown Girl/' Ancient myth from Germanic 

days still lurks in the reference to middle-earth, an 

alliterative phrase of "Sir Cawline," and in those "rivers 

aboon the knee" or even "red blude to the knee," of 

"Thomas Rymer." 

"For a' the bluid that's shed on earth 
Rins through the springs of that countrie," 

is perhaps popular lore, too, with a glimpse of the old 
Scandinavian "water-hell;" Professor J. A. Stewart 
aptly compares with this verse the mention in Dante of 
those infernal rivers which are fed by human tears. One 
may also note the willingness of the foresters to "ride the 
fords of hell" if they can catch Johnie Cock. Perhaps, 
moreover, there is a shred of myth left in the description 
of a "mountain . . . dreary wi' frost and snow" which 
the Demon Lover declares to be his proper abode. The 
red cock and the gray that call back the wife's three sons 
at Usher's Well, the "milk-white and the gray" that 
summon Sweet William's ghost, represent the usual 
white, red, and black of folklore, and have near relatives 
in old Norse myth, which heard the crowing of the dark- 
red cock as warning from the underworld. In another 
version of the latter ballad, it is simply the ordinary cock- 
crow and the "wild fowl" boding day. One of the most 
persistent echoes of an old idea is the mention in many 
ballads of a more or less supernatural light that is given 
out by some object. Weapons were once prone to this 



FOLKLORE IN THE BALLADS 303 

service; Valhalla was said to be lighted by the gleam of 
swords, and readers of the Beowulf remember how the 
magic brand throws radiance about that hall below the 
sea "even as when heaven's candle shines from the sky." 
In "Salomon and Saturn," light beams from the barrow 
of a dead warrior where still lies his sword, although in 
the Norse lay of Helgi it is the spears that shine. Magic, 
to be sure, is not far away; men were wont to read the 
future in their gleaming swords, — im schwerte sehen ; 
but for the most part this illumination is contemporary. 
For ballads, the little champion's sword in "Sir Aldingar " 
casts light over all the field ; but our singer's comment is 
feeble to a degree: "it shone so of gilding." A late Scot- 
tish ballad is quite as superfluously rational with Charlie 
Macpherson's sword and targe; and Lang Johnny 
More's armor is also bright in mere prose, dimming the 
king's eye. But the rings on the fingers of Old Robin's 
wife are better, and "cast light through the hall;" and 
in "Young Lamkin" we are with good magic again. 
"How can I see without candle ?" asks the lady; and her 
false nurse replies that there are two smocks in the coffer 
as white as a swan; "put one of them about you, it will 
show^ you light down." Lamkin cut off her head, and 
hung it up in the kitchen : "it made a' the ha' shine," — a 
weird bit of folklore. The light from clothes became a 
commonplace, and very common at that, copied by vulgar 
songs. In a ribald piece * about Charity the Chambermaid, 

1 Bodleian, 4 Rawlin., 566. Another of the deplorable sort has a line 
"wavers like the wind," familiar in a Scottish version of Child Maurice. 



304 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

her poet unexpectedly tells how "such a light sprung 
from her clothes, as if the morning-star had rose," — 
more than negligible stuff, were it not for its witness to 
the influence of good traditional ballads upon these out- 
cast things. That weapons and implements, even ships, 
are addressed as persons and respond, is an assumption 
at the very heart of folklore and still potent in ballad 
tradition. Cospatrick's sword reveals a secret; 1 but we 
miss in English versions not only the horror and audacity 
of a piece like the Danish "Hsevnersvaerdet," where the 
hero has to restrain his sword's avenging thirst for blood 
by naming its name, but also such vivid personifications as 
when in the Beowulf a blade "sings eager war-song," 
and in the Finnsburg fragment "shield calls to shaft." 

A more obvious minor source of composition lies in the 
constant use, and the incidental abuse, of phrases that 
become common property. Some of these have been 
noted as a part of incremental repetition. Lists of ballad 
"formulas," not very satisfactory so far, have been made 
in Germany and compared here and there with identical 
or similar forms which went to make up the body of Ger- 
manic traditional verse. With the lapse of alliterative 
poetry, however, many of the old forms lost their sugges- 
tive, almost inevitable quality, and disappeared. Ballad 
commonplaces, on the other hand, are mainly connected 
with the situation or the event, and so have a kind of 
permanence; their parallels in older verse consist less in 

1 GUBrenton 9 B,22: — 

" And speak up, my bonny brown sword, that winna lie." 



STOCK PHRASES 305 

epic phrases than in conventional descriptions of battle 
or the like, when gray wolf of the wood, dewy-feathered 
eagle, and horny-nibbed raven follow the path of war. 
To be sure, the ballads have a store of mainly alliterative 
formulas that answer to the Germanic tradition; but such 
a formula as "kissed her baith cheek and chin" often 
takes the incremental way : — 

" 'It's kiss will I your cheek, Annie, 
And kiss will I your chin.' " 

The main point is that ballad folk do the same things 
under the same circumstances, and in a fairly limited 
sphere of events; hence these recurring phrases, sen- 
tences, stanzas, w x hich may well claim a page or so of 
quotation. Child Waters and Lord Lovel are intro- 
duced as combing their milk-white steeds and making 
rude remarks to their sweethearts. Chaucer's squire, 1 
gracious and graceful to a degree, keen to win his lady's 
favor, would not be guilty of such talk; ballads take 
the traditional and popular point of view towards the 
youth of high lineage. When met alone, our young gen- 
tleman is combing his own yellow hair. Turning to his 
aristocratic counterpart among women, if she is not one 
of twenty-four maids playing ball, we find her in her bower 
alone and "sewing the silken seam." If she starts off 
alone, mainly for quite serious reasons, she is sure to 
kilt her green kirtle a little above her knee and braid her 

1 This critical parallax, so to speak, which one gets by comparing the 
ballad way with Chaucer's, is invaluable in any study of our poetry as it 
passes from its medieval to its modern state. 



306 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

yellow hair a little above her brow. From force of habit 
this must be done even when, like Margaret, she pursues 
a vanishing ghost. She summons her lover when she 
pulls flower, leaf, nut, in the grove. Sometimes she 
must send for him from afar. Pages all run errands 
with the same consistency and success, getting the same 
promise of reward, making the same profession of devo- 
tion, swimming when they come to broken bridges, and 
slacking shoon to run over grass; doing things mean- 
while which are quite hard to understand, such as bend- 
ing the bow at rivers and using it for a pole-vault over 
the wall at their destination. They are apt to say that 
they have come through "moss and mire." The knight, 
husband, lover, thus summoned, if not leaning over 
his castle parapets to behold both dale and down, is at 
a table which he knocks or kicks over at the exciting 
news, obtained after three questions, where only the third 
is serious. If the news be false, the page shall be hanged; 
if it is true, he is to have great reward. If a letter is 
brought, the first line makes the hero laugh loud; the 
second or third calls out tears. Straightway he has three 
horses saddled, specifying their colors; the third, pre- 
ferably white, is the choice, often after absurd trials of 
the other two. Consistency is not a jewel always set 
in these phrases. Child Waters, in a familiar formula, 
will have his new-born son washed in the milk, and the 
mother rolled in the silk; the Cruel Mother would 
do both for the bonnie babes she sees; * but Willy of 
1 In Prince Heather, A, 8, wash with milk and dry with silk. 



BALLAD CONVENTIONS 307 

Douglas Dale, fugitive with his wife in the greenwood, 
must go through the same agreeable but impossible 
ceremony for his son and heir. Heroes wipe their 
swords, not always appropriately, on grass, or straw, 
or their own sleeves, before making that last shrewd 
thrust; what, we ask, with Cicero, what is Tubero's 
sword doing meanwhile ? Fair Annet is set aside for her 
poverty; but she goes to Lord Thomas's wedding in 
the correct dress of richest quality, on a horse capari- 
soned in silver and gold, and with four and twenty good 
knights and as many fair ladies in her train. Heroes 
and heroines are always yellow-haired, and blindingly 
blond, as becomes their Germanic pedigree; change 
to the brunette type is a fairly sufficient disguise. The 
proud porter, who, as one remembers, so irritated 
Matthew Arnold by talking drivel not strictly Homeric, 
greets the supposed harpers : — 

"... 'And your color were white and redd, 
As it is blacke and brown, 
I wold save King Estmere and his brother 
Were comen untill this towne.' " 

Hind Horn covers up his fair locks for disguise. Even the 
athletic heroes, even Robin Hood, are "white as milk;" 
their dress glitters, mainly red, gold, and indefinitely 
splendid. The ladies like Faire Ellen often wear green; 
Scott noted that illustrations in sundry medieval manu- 
scripts held to this color. But there is plenty of glitter here ; 
Ajinet's dress "skinkles." Fair Ellen, as Burd Ellen in a 
Scottish version, wears "the scarlet and brown." Willie's 



308 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

"milk-white weed" 1 is startling. Lady Margaret's fa- 
ther comes "clothed all in blue;" Lady Maisry's "wear- 
ing the gold so red." Alliterative phrases like "purple 
and palle," "in the royal red," are conventional; but 
Johnie Armstrong's men, and Will Stewart and John, 
are described more in detail; the latter in scarlet red, with 
black hats, feathers white and gold, silk stockings, garters 
golden trimmed, and shoes "of the cordevine," or Spanish 
leather. This care for details leads away from balladry, 
and points, though from remote distance, to Chaucer. The 
ballads simply give a touch of splendor, as with persons 
who are loaded with gold to the point of concealment, 
like that drowned sister; as with towers, halls, gates, 
gleaming with gold, like Child Waters's mansion or the 
hall of Hrothgar in the Beowulf; and as with horses 
that are silver shod before and golden shod behind, but 
are not further described. One deals with types. There 
is no attempt at the concrete, individual portrait. Occa- 
sionally contrast is employed : two heads on one pillow, 
— Lady Maisdrey like the molten gold, Auld Ingram 
like a toad! In "The Gay Goshawk," how, asks the mes- 
senger bird of the lover, how shall I your true-love know 
from another ? The answer is not explicit, — fairest in 
England, and to be distinguished out of the conven- 
tional twenty-four by the gold on her skirt and on her 
hair. Another version at this point falls sheer out of 
balladry : — 

1 No. 70. See the absurd increment of color in dress quoted above, 
p. 88. 



BALLAD CONVENTIONS 309 

"The red that is in my love's cheek 
Is like blood spilt among the snaw, 
The white that is on her breast-bone 
Is like the down on the white sea-maw." 

This will never do. 

The "wee pen-knife" in "Babylon," "a little wee 

sword" of "Young Johnstone" and other ballads, 

which often "hangs low down by the gare," or dress, is a 

curious commonplace; 1 men carry this pen-knife as well 

as women. It should belong by rights only to Child 

Maurice's schoolmasters. Babylon, however, stabs home 

with it; the cruel mother kills her babes with it; while 

Clerk Colvill uses it merely to cut cloth, drawing his good 

sword for serious work. Fights are much of a kind in the 

ballads, and are seldom described in detail. Heroes stop 

even then to wipe their blades. The "awkward" stroke 

finishes after long struggle in sweat and blood; even the 

potter, fighting Robin Hood, makes one of these strokes 

with his staff. Death is seldom a matter for lingering or 

comment;, and the commonplace of giving the nobler 

or better of two dead persons the sun-side of the grave is 

as familiar and chivalrous as the uniting briar-and-rose 

from tombs of parted lovers is familiar and beautiful. 

The favorite characters of the old ballad of communal 

tradition are the knight and the lady, wife or maid, who 

1 These phrases are so common as to be used without thought of 
consistency. A wee pen-knife may be " three-quarters (of a yard) long." 
So a babe just born may be an "auld son" (no. 64, B, 6, 7); true-love 
comes to be any sweetheart, and "false true-love" need not shock, any 
more than "good" Sir Guy or "good" William a Trent, villains both 
and disturbers of greenwood peace. 



310 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

were in the focus of communal view and represented the 
fairly homogeneous life of that day. 

All these commonplaces, and many more, all the super- 
stitions and customs and sayings of the folk, were in the 
ballad air, and involved no borrowing as we now under- 
stand the term. Stories drifted along as popular tales or as 
scraps of learned and literary record, and were also taken 
in. Nothing can be more uncertain than the actual 
sources and making of a ballad; it can be grouped with 
other ballads, and its constituent parts may be paralleled 
from a hundred near or remote pieces of popular litera- 
ture; but just how and when and where it was put 
together in its present forms is seldom to be known. 
The date of making is hardly ever the date of record. 
Ballads recovered from late Scottish tradition may be 
older in fact, as they certainly are older in structural form, 
than ballads handed down in manuscripts three or four 
centuries old. And a further cause of confusion must be 
noted : not only is a ballad changed to almost any extent 
in tradition, not only does tradition itself largely deter- 
mine the matter and the style, but there is still the possi- 
bility, often enough fact, of parts of one ballad fusing 
with parts of another and so forming a piece which in 
course of time may come to its own individual rights. It 
is this peculiar quality of tradition which makes the 
classifying of ballads difficult enough, even without refer- 
ence to source and date, and which renders nugatory so 
many judgments of the critic who undertakes to settle 
questions of general origin and particular derivation by 



FUSION OF BALLADS 311 

the laws of artistic poetry. We must not forget how much 
the ballad, and the dance out of which it sprang, meant 
for an unlettered community, and how many strands 
must be unraveled in this complicated web of traditional 
verse. Even where feudal conditions are invaded by 
modern ways almost to the point of extinction, as in the 
Western Islands at the time of Johnson's visit, the old 
impulses live on. Clan equality, homogeneous life, the 
fact that all eat at the same board and bear the same 
name, keep ancient custom alive. "We performed, with 
much activity," says Boswell, 1 "a dance which I suppose 
the emigration from Sky has occasioned. They call it 
America. Each of the couples, after the common in- 
volutions and evolutions, successively whirls round in 
a circle till all are in motion; and the dance seems 
intended to show how emigration catches till a whole 
neighborhood is set afloat." It is no very far cry back 
to the Frisian pirates; and while the Celtic ballad is not, 
one would like to know more of the words that high- 
landers and islanders must once have sung to their 
choral and dramatic performances. 2 Add tradition to 
these choral elements, and we have factors for the ballad 

1 Ed. Hill, v, 277. 

2 J. Darmesteter, in English Studies, London, 1896, p. 208, after 
defining Ossian as "a combination of two independent epic cycles, 
welded together against nature . . . prettyfied and airified to suit 
eighteenth century tastes," goes on to give "a fine example of the essen- 
tial distinction between Primitive poetry and Romantic poetry" by a 
study of " the Irish Helen whom the ancient epics call Derdrin." Primi- 
tive poetry is not the term. We should have the old Celtic songs of the 
dance, not the work of their epic bards, to get at the primitive stuff. 



312 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

which cannot be treated by modern rules of the poetic 
game. What, for instance, of the text ? Mindful of the 
great critical achievements in classical and other litera- 
ture, scholars have tried to restore the "original text" 
of a traditional ballad. 1 As has been already asked, how 
can there be such a thing as this original text ? There are 
texts, versions, now of manuscript authority and now 
from singing or recitation ; but the very conditions of the 
case, the postulate that every one of these ballads must 
derive from tradition of the people, absolutely bars this 
idea of a single and authoritative source. The task of the 
editor is to follow back each of the versions to its par- 
ticular origin, and to separate from it any "improve- 
ments" or changes due to interference from whatever 
hand. But when he has reached the dairymaid or the 
"old man," who got it by natural process in its traditional 
course, he has done all he can do for it; he has traced it 
to popular tradition. Of a large group of variant versions, 
he selects the best, the oldest, those which agree with 
the kindred ballad in other tongues, and prints them all 
in the order of preference. That is the only "classical" 
treatment of ballads. For anthologies the different ver- 
sions may be combined into one; but this task is difficult, 
and the best of the versions, as representative, will in most 
cases serve the reader's turn. 

Fidelity to traditional report is the collector's main 
virtue, although his opportunity is now mainly gone. 
The great harvest was reaped in Scotland a century or 
1 See above, p. 267. 



BALLAD COLLECTING 313 

more ago; but in colonial and remote, undisturbed nooks 
a degenerate version is now and then to be found, — 
like the North Carolina texts of " The Maid Freed from 
the Gallows" and "The Wife of Usher's Well." But 
the ballad has vanished from its old haunts. Sir George 
Douglas has noted that at the annual dinner of the border 
shepherds, held at Yetholm in the Cheviots, these old 
ballads are heard no more; they have found a precarious 
refuge, he says, among fisher-folk in the obscure little 
havens, but it is evident that their time is past. 1 In the 
eighteenth century they were still heard everywhere in 
rural and remote communities. Percy relied not only on 
his folio, but on friends and correspondents whom he 
inspired with the collector's zeal. Over thirty ballads 
collected for him in this way are now in the Harvard 
College Library. Scott, of course, had an even larger 
staff of helpers, and both his published and manuscript 
collections are beyond price. Before him, David Herd, 
distinguished for his fidelity to the material in hand, his 
unwillingness to improve or change, had done splendid 
service. Mrs. Brown 2 of Falkland is the best known of all 
the reciters; her versions are straight from tradition, and 
were set down about 1783. Sharpe, Motherwell, Kinloch, 
and others, were helpful in the good cause; and in our 
own day the diligence of Mr. Macmath, who supplied 

1 See G. L. Kittredge's sketch of Mr. Child's life, prefixed to the large 
edition, p. xxviii. "... little or nothing of value remains to be recov- 
ered in this way." See, also, The Bitter Withy, printed above, p. 228. 

2 She was born in 1747, and learned most of her ballads before 1759. 
So Mr. Macmath's information, Child, i, 455. 



314 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

so much of the new material to Professor Child, should 
be gratefully borne in mind. 1 

While the ballad remained wholly a traditional affair, 
the treasure of the humble, there was no danger that it 
would be adapted to purposes of the literary world. 
Towards the close of the eighteenth century, however, 
after Percy's collecting and Herder's preaching had dig- 
nified these fugitive songs, Cinderella was brought forth 
triumphantly from her nook, and was even exalted above 
her sisters. 2 Tradition, too, had begun to lose its vitality; 
and there was now room as well as incitement for the 
repair, the imitation, the counterfeit. Of these, indeed, 
the crime of counterfeit was far less damaging than the 
peccadillo of repair. Collectors themselves found it hard 
to keep their improving hands off the material which 
they gathered from so rude a source. Allingham, a born 
poet and fine critic, changes "Bonnie James Campbell," 
and puts an intrusive stanza of his own into "The Wife 
of Usher's Well." Scott himself retouched old versions, 
set them dancing where they limped, or seemed to limp, 
and in one case, "Kinmont Willie," really made up a 
new ballad by the best model in the world. "Katharine 
Jaffray," too, has many marks of Sir Walter on it. Burns 

1 Joseph Ritson ought to be canonized by lovers of the ballad, if only 
for his indomitable zeal in editing and his passionate accuracy. Full of 
evil were his days, and his end was dark indeed; but his services to sound 
learning should never be forgotten. 

2 This whole movement has been traced by the present writer in the 
Introduction to his Old English Ballads ; there is no need to repeat the 
journey. 



BALLAD EDITING 315 

had a little commerce, not very extensive, with "Tarn 
Lane;" and no one can question that all these ballads are 
good. In general, however, it may be said that literary 
imitation of the ballad, patchwork or piece, is a failure; 
and the possible exceptions to this rule — Mr. Andrew 
Lang informs me that he would count with them such a 
piece as old Elspeth sings * about "the red Harlaw" — 
only emphasize the wide difference between poetry of the 
people and poetry of art. In times before Scott, editorial 
improvement was common enough. Percy's feats and 
Ritson's rage are notorious; but it must be remembered 
that something of the sort was needed to secure readers. 
Show touches of "elegance," and you could beguile 
the man of taste into appreciation of the rough and the 
sincere. Even Herder served up his ballads and folk 
songs along with soliloquies from Shakespeare. The 
famous Percy Folio, rescued from the office of lighting 
fires in Humphrey Pitt's mansion, was written about 
1650: it was probably a faithful transcript, but even here 
allowance must be made for considerable changes in the 
passage from tradition to record, so that with the actual 
text before us, and Percy's iniquities swept away, we are 
not dealing with absolute tradition. The later group of 

1 In the fortieth chapter of The Antiquary. "'It's a historical ballad,' 
said Oldbuck eagerly, 'a genuine and undoubted fragment of minstrelsy. 
Percy would admire its simplicity, Ritson could not impugn its authen- 
ticity.' " The prose thrown in by Elspeth is interesting; and Scott's 
account of the "shrill, tremulous voice . . . chanting ... in a wild 
and doleful recitation" is no fiction. He had heard such voices often 
singing just such ballads. 



316 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLAD 

collectors, just now noted, who took down ballads from 
singing and recitation, learned fairly well the lesson of 
fidelity and literal report; but here again was danger, 
even with such a splendid recorder as Herd, that abbre- 
viation, forgetfulness, distortion, and outright fabrication, 
on the part of singer or reciter, should play havoc with the 
genuine traditional ballad. Fabrication counted for 
much in the performances of that "wight of Homer's 
craft" whom Buchan hired to collect popular ballads in 
the north of Scotland, and a spurious, silly affair like 
"Young Ronald " is indefensible; but it may be said that 
this fabrication, however poor in quality, held fairly well 
to the structural and traditional form. As one can never 
tell where a bit of genuine traditional verse is mingled 
with the wight Rankin's own making, the versions have 
been admitted by Professor Child; it is true, moreover, 
that the blind beggar has had more blame than he 
deserved. His potations are fearfully thin; but it is real 
" Scotch " which one does taste in them, and he knew both 
the people and their songs. He ought not to have been 
"paid by the piece." Buchan's own feats of compilation, 
to be sure, must not go uncursed; his long version of 
"Young Waters" is called by Mr. Child "a counterfeit 
of the lowest description." But on the whole Peter did 
far more good than harm. 

Other versions of ballads from recitation in Scotland 
seem sound; barring the accidents already named, they 
should represent the traditional ballad at the stage which 
tradition had reached in the early eighteenth century 



BALLAD FORGERIES 317 

under conditions of a fairly homogeneous rural life. What 
they do not directly represent is the primitive and original 
ballad itself. That is not to be recovered, though it can 
be inferred. The normal type of the popular ballad is 
something which one must make up, as a composite pho- 
tograph, from the best old manuscript versions and the 
versions of soundest oral tradition. The printed sources, 
to be sure, vary greatly in value, and open the door to far 
more serious chances of corruption; but in many cases 
they help rather than hinder the composite process. 
Patient sifting and testing of all this material leads to 
sure results, and enables the true ballad critic to throw 
out a vast amount of alien stuff. What he keeps is the 
real; but this real is not always good. Mr. Henderson 
makes it the reproach of Professor Child's collection that 
"the chaff is out of all proportion to the wheat." Possibly. 
But the chaff is wheat-chaff, not sawdust or other sham; 
and this is the triumph of the edition. For the matter of 
wheat and chaff, of good and bad, any selection of 
genuine ballads must be an affair of purely subjective 
judgment. 

Forgeries and imitations need not detain us long. 
Everybody has heard of Lady Wardlaw's "Hardyknut," * 
which appeared as early as 1719, and bewrays itself at 
once to the ballad-reader. Clever Scottish women of the 

1 See curious remarks by T. Warton, Observations on the Fairy 
Queen, 2d ed., i, 156 (1762), on this "noble old Scottish poem" which 
he now hears was written "near fifty years ago" by a lady. "The late 
lord president Forbes was in the secret, and used to laugh at the decep- 
tion of the world." 



318 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

later eighteenth century wrote more than one song which 
was accepted as popular; but now and then a woman of 
humbler parts undertook this amiable fraud. Among 
the pamphlets in the Bodleian library * is "The Knyghte 
of the Golden Locks; an Ancyent Poem, Applicable to 
the Present Times, Selected from many others in the 
Possession of Mrs. Morgan." "Mary Morgan " remarks, 
by way of preface, that though this ballad is in no collec- 
tion, she sincerely believes it "to be an original." It is 
fit, she thinks, for these times when men are going to war. 
She has kindly "altered obsolete words," but gives three 
stanzas in their "primitive orthography." It is deplorable 
stuff, and has all the marks of a poor forgery; but in 
these premises, as Sir Walter proved later, one may "lie 
like a gentleman." 

" ' O happy horse,' the ladye cryd, 
And strok'd his rainbow neck." 

Absolutely nothing happens in the ballad except ortho- 
graphy — of the primitive kind. Mrs. Morgan says she 
learned to love Percy's "Reliques" when she was visiting 
Admiral Sir Joseph Knight, "whose daughter, Miss 
Cornelia Knight, has distinguished herself by her Con- 
tinuation of Dr. Johnson's ' Rasselas.' " Besides ladies, the 
clergy could take part in this pious fraud; witness the 
Rev. Mr. Lamb's "Laidly Worm," which he calls "a 
song five hundred years old, made by the old Mountain 
Bard, Duncan Frasier, living in Cheviot, a. d., 1270. 

1 G. Pamph. 1740, no. 26. It is dated Wisbech, 1799. 



BALLAD IMITATIONS 319 

From an ancient manuscript." But Mr. Lamb was no 
Chatterton. 1 

Imitations differ from forgeries only in the matter of 
morals. Scott has been mentioned for his successful work; 
some harmless and not very effectual imitations, made by 
himself and Leyden and C. K. Sharpe, he inserted in his 
"Minstrelsy." If these men failed, and they did fail, who 
should succeed ? Again, there is the general imitation of 
the type, such as began feebly enough and at very long 
range; as early as Prior it is to be noted, and it appears 
in differing degrees of merit as the work of Shenstone, 
Collins, Goldsmith, and the notorious Mallet. Unlike 
either of these ways, the collector's and the amateur's, was 
that delightful robbery of a stanza or so from tradition, 
by Scott or Burns, so as to get a motive for a song. Thus 
Campbell, collecting airs, "got in the south country," 
from recollections of a lady's singing, two traditional 
stanzas of a ballad known more completely in other ver- 
sions; the first stanza ran thus: 2 — 

" * Why weep ye by the tide, ladye, 

Why weep ye by the tide ? 
I'll wed ye to my youngest son 

And ye sail be his bride. 
And ye sail be his bride, ladye, 

Sae comely to be seen,' . . . 
But aye she loot the tears down fa' 

For John o' Hazelgreen." 

1 Chambers has a formidable list of forged ballads, including some 
of the best pieces. The conclusions of Professor Veitch on this subject, 
History and Poetry of the Scottish Border, ii, 81, seem quite beside the 
mark. 

2 No. 293, E, 1. 



320 THE SOURCES OF THE BALLADS 

"O whaten a man is Hazelgreen ?" the weeping maid is 
asked. " Long arms, shoulders broad, sae comely," she 
says, and lets the tears fall on. Scott keeps the stanza, 
changes the hero's name, and makes his own charming 
song, — far more effective for modern taste than this 
particular piece. But the song is not a ballad. Haunting 
lines can beget whole poems; we know what the ballad- 
fragment, "Child Roland to the dark tower came," could 
do for Browning, and what provocation there is in many 
a refrain : — 

"For we'll never gang doun to the broom nae mair." 

Only it must be remembered that the romantic and senti- 
mental turn of these modern poems was quite foreign 
to the ballad whose fragment inspired them. Even the 
objective character — hilbsch objectiv, said mocking 
Heine — of the literary ballad, the "Agincourts," the 
"Hohenlindens," the "Revenges," the "Herve Riels," 
and, above all, of the refrain ballad such as Rossetti 
wrote so effectively and Calverley parodied with his 
"butter and eggs and a pound of cheese," even this 
severe but conscious impersonality is far removed from 
the communal note of tradition. The old songs were 
made by the people and handed down by the people; no 
individual author, going about his work as an artist in 
poetry, can make his work impersonal in the old sense. 
Once again be it said that "popular" as a definition by 
origins, as conveying the idea that ballads were really 
made by the people, does not mean a single, initial pro- 



BALLAD IMITATIONS 321 

cess of authorship on the part of a festal throng. Such a 
conception involves a contradiction in terms and flouts 
common sense, assuming the choral foundation and reject- 
ing that epic process which is tradition itself. The ballad 
is a conglomerate of choral, dramatic, lyric, and epic ele- 
ments which are due now to some suggestive refrain, now j 
to improvisation, now to memory, now to individual in- ' 
vention, and are forced into a more or less poetic unity by 
the pressure of tradition in long stretches of time. In this 
sense they represent no individual, but are the voice of 
the people; and successful imitation of them by any indi- 
vidual, however gifted and sympathetic he may be, is a 
task hardly to be done. The great poems of the world are 
far greater than the greatest ballads; but no poet has 
ever had the power to compete with popular tradition on 
its own ground. Art can create far beyond the beauty of 
sea-shells, and on occasion can exactly reproduce them; 
but it cannot fashion or imitate their murmur of the sea. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 




N this world the question of values is impera- 
tive; and an account of the popular ballad 
must be rendered in terms of its achieve- 
ment and its essential worth. True, what 
is popular is not every man's affair. "Study the people," 
said Goldsmith to Gray, quoting Isocrates and deprecat- 
ing the exclusive, learned appeal of the Odes; but "I do 
not love that word 'people,'" is Bacon's way. In these 
opinions, however, there is nothing either bad or good 
for balladry. Bacon was thinking of the rabble; Gold- 
smith had what we call the public in his mind ; but in the 
vital days of the ballad, it dealt with that collective power 
which is now absorbed with other forces in the idea of 
society. Social realization in art can by no conception be 
called common or unclean even now, but must rather be 
regarded as drawing the individual out of his more sordid 
self; what is bad in art is really antisocial. 1 If this is true 
in days when the individual has achieved such a command 
of the field, it must have meant everything for primitive 
times and for the more homogeneous community. What 
qualities, then, would pass into the ballad from its com- 

1 Some excellent consideration of this point will be found in the early 
pages of M. Faguet's Propos Litteraires, Paris, 1902. 



THE DIFFERENCES 323 

munal and social origins, and what would it fail to 
receive ? Briefly stated, the ballad may be said to possess 
the advantages and disadvantages of a cumulative appeal 
to the emotion of a throng, and to lack the advantages 
and disadvantages of suggestive appeal to individual 
imagination. These lines of difference are not hard and 
fast, but they will serve; and they may be tested by 
certain facts. 

Writing to a friend, Taine once declared 1 that art is a 
general idea put into the most particular form. As for 
the poets, instead of fine distinctions in color and outline 
to express this idea, one finds in them a word, a metaphor, 
a sound, a suppression, a turn of phrase, which can be 
discovered nowhere else. Here, in the affirmation of 
modern poetry, is plain negation of the more primitive 
ballad. The ballads are conventional and formal to a 
degree; their chief marks are the refrain, that constant 
repetition of the text, those recurrent commonplaces. 
Rhythm itself, the communal and conventional essence 
of poetry, appeals to certain modern poets as too vulgar 
a form; and they oppose to it centrifugal devices of every 
sort. But before poetry grew to be the cult of the unusual, 
rhythm was the only vehicle for pleasant or beautiful or 
even entertaining words. John of Ireland, who wrote 
"the earliest extant example of original literary prose in 
Scots/' apologizes in quaint phrase; "thocht my language 

1 Correspond. (May, 1854), ii, 47. One thinks of the advice to poets 
by Eumolpus in Petronius: effugiendum est ab omni verborum ut ita 
dicam vilitate; et summendae voces a plebe summotae. 



324 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

be nocht in Ryme nor plesand to part of pepil," he says, 
it will nevertheless appeal to the religious sort by reason of 
its matter. In brief, repetition of sound, word, phrase, 
structure, is the soul of balladry, and is precisely what 
modern poetry disowns. Suppose that Dante should 
repeat "we read no more that day" for his next pair of 
lovers, and his next, repeating the event! Suppose that 
Shakespeare put Hamlet's soliloquy into the mouths of all 
his tragic heroes! In ballads we must renounce every 
aesthetic surprise of form and phrase. One searches them 
in vain for that vivid line, that memorable word, which 
flash out of the situation and the act, marking them for- 
ever and belonging to them alone. Ballads are full of 
action, and they give us situations quite as strong as that 
of "The Duchess of Malfi" in which the brother stands 
over his murdered sister; but where is "Cover her face; 
mine eyes dazzle; she died young," or anything approach- 
ing such a verse? It is impossible to note high-water 
marks of ballad achievement, as Matthew Arnold was fain 
to do for poetry itself, by quoting test or tonic passages. 
Perhaps the appeal of Fair Ellen to the surly Child, or 
her lullaby, both quoted on a preceding page, might go 
for a specimen to justify our praise; but these are inade- 
quate, and any detached portion is inadequate. The 
whole ballad is the thing. One would rather bid the 
seeker after excellent differences of the ballads to read 
"Child Waters" itself, "Babylon," "Lord Randal," 
"Spens," "Glasgerion," "The Wife of Usher's Well;" 
to read " Johnie Cock," "Robin Hood and the Monk," 



METRE AND DICTION 325 

"Jock o' the Side," the "Cheviot;" and to sing out loud 
and bold whatever else commends itself, like the lilt of 
"St. Stephen" * or the crooning air of the "Queen of 
Elfan's Nourice." One must live one's way into balladry, 
must learn to love it as a whole and not by elegant 
extracts. Such passages as one can call vivid and mem- 
orable to some degree are recurrent, traditional, un- 
fixed, the very opposite of particular. Even the affecting 
close of "The Twa Brothers" is found elsewhere. The 
force of ballad style is centripetal, emotional, communal, 
cumulative, not suggestive, not intellectual and centrifu- 
gal. What is true of the style, the invention, is also true 
of the external form. Ballad airs differ, of course, 
although a severe simplicity marks them all; but the 
rhythmical scheme shows no attempt at originality. 
Ballad metres are almost uniform; the range is very 
slight; and they can all be reduced to variations of the 
immemorial verse of four accents 2 which savage poetry 

1 "I sing it all over the house," said Professor Child to the present 
writer with regard to this ballad. Readers should note an admirable 
summary of Child's obiter dicta on ballads and the ballad, collected from 
his various introductions and notes, by Professor Walter M. Hart, 
printed in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, xxi, 
755 ff. The great scholar's judgment, is almost invariably unassailable. 
Perhaps in the passage (v, 299) where he calls the Fire of Frendraught 
and The Baron of BracMey "fairly good," but adds that these and others 
composed in the seventeenth century are not to be compared with Mary 
Hamilton, one feels a desire to lift BracMey clean out of its bracket, 
though not to the level of Hamilton. 

2 Preserved in the old two-line ballad stanza, and not very remote 
in the septenarius, however this may be related to the sacred Latin 



326 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

prefers and which may even lie behind later develop- 
ments like the hexameter and the Saturnian. The verse- 
scheme is simple; and has not the resources even of 
regular alliterative verse, which is capable of so much 
emphasis and change. In rime there is little variety and 
no originality; a few obvious combinations do yeoman 
work. Alliteration, common enough, is mainly a matter 
of traditional phrases; as conscious effort it is rare, found 
chiefly in the chronicle ballads and in an occasional out- 
burst like the "fat fadge by the fire" of "Lord Thomas." 
The vocabulary, too, is slender; perhaps a "disserta- 
tion " will one day count all the ballad words. Inversions, 
meant as inversions, and antitheses are practically un- 
known; there is as little conscious testing of the possibili- 
ties of surprise in the order as in the choice of expression. 
Climax is never calculated; if it occurs, it is merely the 
end of the singer's material ; and to modern notions, 
the singer sometimes fails to stop where he ought to stop, 
— as in Percy's beautiful speech over Douglas. So, too, 
divergencies from common usage ! are generic; it is 
simply the traditional ballad way, as in the case of the 
superfluous pronoun, found even in French: — 

"Le fils du roi, il a jure." 

A corresponding peculiarity, omission of the relative, as 

1 Ballads taken from the recitation of servants and nurses, when not in 
marked dialect, are often disfigured with ungrammatical, silly, and vul- 
gar phrases. This is not surprising. The surprising fact is that so many 
of the traditional ballads are quite free from these disfigurements, and 
show a simple dignity of language quite their own. 



EPITHET AND FIGURE 327 

in "I holp a pore yeman, with wrong was put behind," 
and "sent it to Sir Patrick Spens, was walking on the 
strand/' is not peculiar to ballads, though characteristic. 
The leaps and omissions of narrative have been noticed 
already; they form no intentional feature of style, but 
spring from the choral origins of the ballad and are of the 
essence of its tradition. 

The same centripetal, tendency, the same failure to 
suggest and to provoke the imagination, rule in what is 
called figurative language. All the epithets are timid, 
traditional, general; they do not commit themselves. 
Any water is "wan." Ladies are "gay," but so are rings. 
The hero bears himself "like a king's son," and the maid 
is "as leal as the moon shines on." A wife is as true "as 
stone in the castle wall;" but a different case, "as dead 
as the stones in the wall," seems to take the faithful 
quality away. Comparisons as a whole are few and of 
the smallest range; "feet as white as sleet" is the only 
touch of surprise. Lady Barnard's eye, turned on Little 
Musgrave, is "bright as the summer sun," and out- 
laws in their forest are "light as leaf on linden;" 
but these are common stuff. There is no attempt to 
"heighten" style as an individual and artistic feat. Con- 
vention is followed through thick and thin, even when it 
is at odds with the fact. 

" O wha woud wish the win' to blaw, 
Or the green leaves fa' therewith? 
Or wha wad wish a leeler love 
Than Brown Adam the Smith ? 



328 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

"His hammer's o' the beaten gold, 
His study 's J o' the steel, 
His fingers white are my delite, 
He blows his bellows well. ,, 

The conventional hero of ballads is bound to show the 
milk-white skin somewhere, and his effects must bristle 
with gold; hence our preposterous blacksmith. Again, 
the introduction of him by those pretty but irrelevant 
lines about wind and falling leaves only sets off the general 
poverty of ballads in descriptions of nature, a field where 
poets of all time have followed Taine's formula of the 
general in the particular with extraordinary zeal, and 
where metaphor and simile and hyperbole have achieved 
their worst and their best. This expression of nature in 
new or startling phrase is half of poetry, by the modern 
idea, and a good two-thirds of favorite extracts and 
familiar quotations. But the ballads take nature for 
granted, and say little or nothing about it. Delight in the 
May morning, in the greenwood, the deer, the birds, has 
been noted already along with other particulars of the 
Robin Hood life, and the chronicle ballad elsewhere 
ventures a modest allusion; but in the typical ballad of 
situation and dialogue and refrain, nature plays no part. 
Landscape is ignored. We should like to know more of 
that Silver Wood mentioned in "Child Maurice" and 
" Jellon Grame," for there is a waft of myth in it; but 
not a word is said. So with Wearie's Well. The "unco 
land, where winds never blew nor cocks ever crew," does 

1 Stithy, anvil. 



NATURE 329 

little for us; and the scant notes of True Thomas's jour- 
ney through the other world are disappointing. Who 
nowadays does not remember the description of Grendel's 
abode in the Beowulf, the wolf -haunted crags and windy 
nesses, the wild stream hurrying underground, and then 
the mere itself, so full of horror that even the hounded 
stag chooses to be torn to pieces on its brink rather 
than to plunge for safety into its waves ? Here is strong 
imaginative suggestion; where is it, even faintly, in the 
ballads ? We should have something of this sort about 
Wearie's Well, about other uncanny places, if the indi- 
vidual poet were at work with his inexhaustible treasure 
of comparison, metaphor, glimpse, and hint, derived from 
the processes of nature. "Child Waters" offers the most 
tempting chances for ordinary description, but they are 
not taken; once, indeed, there is mention of the broom, 
but it is only to make a rime for that increment which the 
Robin Hood poets would have thrown out, possibly sub- 
stituting a real touch of description. 

"All this long day Child Waters rode, 
Shee ran bare ffoote by his side ; 
Yett was he never soe courteous a knight 
To say, Ellen, will you ryde ? 

"But all this day Child Waters rode, 

Shee ran barffoote thorow the broome ; 
Yett he was never soe courteous a knight 
As to say, Put on your shoone." 

The water which they cross is specified vaguely as flowing 
"from banke to brim;" at the great hall "of red gold 



330 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

shine the gates," and so it is with the tower, — intolerable 
stretch of conventional splendor. That is all. Not an 
adjective or epithet or description stays with us. When 
"romantic" scenes are mentioned, they are shorn of all 
romance. Moonlight is as little regarded as daylight 
for imaginative purposes. The shut of day means no- 
thing for ballads but the coming of dark — no flush of 

sunset — no 

"... reaped harvest of the light 
Bound up in sheaves of sacred fire," — 

no pomp of stars; the night's face holds no "huge cloudy 
symbols of a high romance;" and sunrise itself, save for 
that scant courtesy in "The Monk," is unhonored and 
unsung. With the same slight allowance, too, it may be 
said that the seasons pass unnoticed. Even in "Spens," 
where the matter is vital, it is only " this time of the year; " 
elsewhere it is either mere calendar, as in "Car" and 
"Otterburn," or else the conventional manner of getting 
the story under way, as in "Sir Andrew Barton," which 
throws in a songbird or so. A refrain — "Aye as the 
gowans grow gay" — can start imagination; but the 
flora and fauna of refrains lack tenue. 

"As the dew flies over the mulberry tree," 

is not reassuring; while 

" The broom blooms bonnie and so it is fair," 

is anticlimax. Moreover, since the method of balladry, 
as of early epic, is cumulative and not suggestive, since 
its art is to give details and not provoke the imagination 



NATURE 331 

into creating them, one must be careful not to assume 
such a provocative intention where none is meant. In 
Motherwell's weird little version of " Sheath and Knife," 
the sisters ride down to the valley "when the green, green 
trees are budding sae gaily," hunt and hawk together, 
till at last one of them is buried in a wide grave; then, — 

" The hawk had nae lure, and the horse had nae master, 
And the faithless hounds thro' the woods ran faster." 

This, if genuine, should not set us dreaming; it is only 

fact, not a beckoning of romance, not a "horn in 'Her- 

nani.' " It was a lover and his lass, or rather one of them 

yearning for the other, that put nature to work in the 

provocative, imaginative way. At first the connection is 

as vague as in an Italian " flower of the vine," or what 

not: — 

" O western wind, when wilt thou blow 
That the small rain down can rain ? 
Christ, that my love were in my arms, 
And I in my bed again ! " 

But it rapidly grew definite. Daybreak songs led to some 
of the finest touches of description; dawn, parting the 
lovers in Wolfram's great lyric, is a bird of prey striking 
fiery talons through the cloud. 1 But the rise of lyric out 
of folk song is apart from our subject; ballads tread the 
epic path. 

The explanation of all this is very evident. Ballads are 
communal, because they spring from the community in 

1 The late ballad, Grey Cock, no. 248, noted above as an aube, has 
no touch of this sort. 



332 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

their choral origins and appeal to it in their traditional 
career. Their source and their object, collective emotion, 
is centripetal in its influence; and is open only to the 
cumulative effect, responding readily to the familiar, 
the repeated, to what is both present and near. It asks 
the same emotional impression over and over again; it 
refuses the series of fresh and varied intellectual sugges- 
tions, as well as all efforts to detach it from its object. 
These qualities, modified in some degree, are taken over 
into the great epics and give the objective cumulative note. 
Epic poetry, however, even in such crude forms as the 
"Gest of Robin Hood," begins to show its centrifugal 
tendencies, not only by modifying this cumulative appeal 
of facts by the omission of refrain and verbal iteration, 
but in positive comment on the facts and in marked 
artistic control. The initial word, "listen," — emphat- 
ically "lithe and listen, gentlemen," — is significant 
enough. The chorus is now discharged, and the ways of 
the chorus are in disrepute. Our poet-reciter or singer 
is already on the steps of the pyramid, and looks over 
his hearers' heads. The Homeric rhapsode, indeed, has 
gone so far as to appeal to a distinct intellectual effort on 
the part of these hearers, making them detach them- 
selves from the story far enough to look down on it 
from the flight of a simile, or from the vantage-ground 
of wide emotional comment. This separable quality the 
ballads never show; while modern epic poems stretch 
it to its limit. In quest of the particular our modern 
and artistic poetry must be capable of detachment at 



OBJECTIVITY 333 

every turn; only so can it gain its splendor and sweep 

of phrase. 

" Flat as to an eagle's eye 
Earth lay under Attila," 

is Mr. Meredith's impressive opening of a poem where 
the centrifugal, particular, and detaching method exactly 
meets the definition of Taine. Hundreds of verses flash 
and dart from every corner of the poetic heaven to light 
up the bridals of Attila and the tragedy of this single 
night. Eleven stanzas, on the other hand, for a contrast 
of method, tell without a trope, without a conscious turn 
of phrase, without a suggestion of the wider world or of 
times past and to come, but in their own conventional 
leap-and-linger style, the story of "Sir Patrick Spens," 
the tragedy of his summons, his journey, and his end. 
This traditional bit of verse, smooth as it has grown, holds 
to the cumulative and undetached habit of genuine ballad 
style. From first to last it is at the heart of the action and 
never attempts to view that action, whether by stuff or 
by phrase, by figure or by comment, from without. It 
moves in a straight if redoubled line to the end, — the 
Scots lords lying at Sir Patrick's feet, half over to Aber- 
dour, fifty fathoms under sea. So, to be sure, Tennyson 
left his Revenge : — 

" And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags 
To be lost evermore in the main." 

But this objective note is not the objective note in 
"Spens." Mr. Kipling, too, is objective and direct; in 
his "Danny Deever," a stirring poem, dialogue and 



334 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

refrain do all, but the method is still suggestive, not 
cumulative. "What's that a-whimperin' overhead?" 
and "I've drunk his beer a score of times," effective as 
they are, are impossible in the ballad of remote choral 
origins and direct traditional source. The difference is 
obvious. All impersonal poetry has "its eye on the 
object;" but a ballad is the object itself, and needs no 
contrasts in time or place. A modern poet bears down 
upon his theme, circles it, and takes it finally by siege 
and storm. When he has it, he does not keep it; he whips 
his readers away from it in order that they may come 
back to it by another path. He stirs abrupt intellectual 
flights, and sets a series of trysts in dreamland. Mr. 
Meredith tells almost nothing of that wild bridal night 
as early epic would tell it; but what provocation lies in 
his flash of trope and figure, his hints, his shadows as from 
flying clouds of reminiscence, to make one see this 
Attila and feel the tragedy of the end ! The conqueror is 
resting from war; that is, — 

" On his people stood a frost," — 
and the army is 

"Like a charger cut in stone." 

Suggestion after suggestion lights the pomp of bridal 
feasting, shades a contrast of the conquered, submissive 
world without, throws a deeper glare on the figures, on 
the bride, Attila, the warriors, — 

"Those rock-faces hung with weed," 
and again the conquest, again feast, bride, king. Where 



EPIC METHODS 335 

is the story? Nearly two hundred verses glitter by be- 
fore the action begins, and then it only seems to begin. 
When the climax comes, it is a picture by sheer simile: 
the chieftain dead, — 

"Square along the couch and stark 
Like the sea-rejected thing," — 

and "that" — 

"Huddled in the corner dark, 
Humped and grinning like a cat." * 

Every epic method is suited to its own time. Ballads 
hold attention to the story by repetition of its main 
details; they leap or linger, but move straight. Ger- 
manic verse, tenacious of its method for a good thousand 
years, as one may guess, combined repetition with varia- 
tion, moving in zigzag. Modern poets move round their 
subject in narrowing circles, and must not repeat. More 
than this. They are bound to startle by unexpected 
phrase and idea, like changing lights on the rhythmically 
moving form of the dancer. In that shift of colors we 
may well forget the meaning of the dance itself; but we 
like the color ; and suum cuique is an old word. What 
does one remember from the fine ballad of "Robin Hood's 
Death"? The story. What does one remember from 
that exquisite and even noble poem, Tennyson's "Morte 
d 'Arthur" ? The setting of it, the colors and sounds, the 
haunting, provocative suggestion, the charm of words. 
Each is open to praise as to blame; but the praise is what 

1 Compare the picture of Judith and Holofernes, as drawn by Anglo- 
Saxon art. 



336 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

abides. Poetry is tested by the strongest and not by the 
weakest links of its chain ; and to call one of these poems 
drivel, the other mere flashlight and innuendo, is to tell 
the half-truth which is a lie. 

Corresponding to this outer circle of differences in style 
and form is the inner circle, the conception of character 
and events. Here the ballads can bear no comparison 
with even early epic art. Their events have no sweep, no 
slow and inexorable sequence; a narrow scene, central, 
unchanged, or perhaps, as in the "split situation," two 
scenes without any careful connection, must suffice. 
Dramatic in origin, in setting, in dialogue, in splendid 
tragic possibilities, the ballads absolutely fail to develop 
what is now regarded as the supreme dramatic fact, — 
character. 1 Robin Hood looms up in fairly personal 
guise ; but Robin is centre of a cycle and has felt the epic 
influences. He has been accounted for in ancestry, birth, 
and breeding; his whole story has been told, retold, 
belied by sordid contaminations, rescued; his death is 
nobly sung. As with Beowulf, hints are given about 
Robin's habits, personal strength, tastes. Contrast the 
ballad of situation and its limited range of character 
in a "Babylon"! One gets not even a motive, not a 
shred of fact, for solution of this tragedy; take it or 
leave it, — but the situation is the thing. A lightning- 
flash reveals it, and the dark straightway swallows it up; 
who can study poses, faces, expression, anything but the 

1 See the already quoted analysis of a Danish ballad and its heroic 
epic predecessor by Professor Ker in Epic and Romance, pp. 147 ff. 



THE ESSENCE OF BALLADRY 337 

group and that swift climax of a merely hinted complica- 
tion ? 

Still less is the chance for comment, the artistic aside, 
the comparison with larger issues. There is no proverbial 
wisdom — although the singer of "Robin Hood and Guy" 
quotes proverbs — in the older choral ballads, and none in 
the ballad of tradition that springs from them. The hero 
does not ask how man can die better than by facing fear- 
ful odds; he faces them, and dies. Even the harmless 
and general contemplatio mortis is absent. 

" For though the day be never so longe, 
At last the belles ringeth to evensonge," 

quaint and pretty sentiment, is no affair of the balladist, 
but the comment of Master Stephen Hawes. For "obser- 
vations of a strong mind operating upon life," Johnson's 
reported phrase, one must go to Johnsonian verse. Reli- 
gion itself is only an incidental matter, and makes no real 
figure in balladry. 

It is time to sum up the case for ballads as a definite 
if closed account of our literature. The overwhelming 
majority of them, committed to oral tradition, have been 
lost; such as have been rescued, however, are probably 
representative in kind as well as in proportion. They 
tell us something of remote origins at the dance, of choral 
and dramatic beginnings which have survived, now merely 
in the mould and structural framework of traditional 
epic ballads, now in the actual version which still clings 
to situation, to repetition m dialogue, and to refrain, as 



S38 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

its chief elements. With the remote beat of foot in the 
ballad is heard louder and nearer the voice of those who 
sing it. It is lyric in this singable quality, or has been so 
once. Tradition by word of mouth, mainly in isolated 
unlettered communities, is its vital test; and narrative is 
its vital fact. Its supreme art is to tell its story well; and 
its narrative is not to be regarded as a mere stalking- 
ground for more serious intentions. Entertainment is an 
obvious purpose ; and Sidney's fine words about the poet 
may be as well applied to the humbler muse of English 
and Scottish ballads. She also "cometh to you with 
words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied 
with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of music; 
and with a tale, forsooth, she cometh unto you, with a 
tale which holdeth children from play and old men from 
the chimney-corner." 

What is this tale, when all is said ? How is it varied ? 
And what mood really prevails ? Rarely is it the thing 
which ought not to be heard ; the ballad muse is cleanly. 
Perhaps five and twenty ballads come under the light or 
comic class, and only a few of these are distinctly coarse. 
"The Keach in the Creel" of the new, "Crow and Pie" 
of the old, are sooty things; to "The Jolly Beggar," 
readers, like certain editors, will give a buffet nicely 
weighted with equal parts of liking and reproof. At its 
best, this pure entertainment, this delight of tales well 
told, meets us in the Robin Hood ballads, as in that 
unrivaled story of the monk's discomfiture in the " Gest," 
and more seriously in the thrill and deeper interest of 



THE ESSENCE OF BALLADRY 339 

"Child Waters." But here we begin, as with a certain 
stage in all poetry, to work below the surface and to find 
deeper meanings whether consciously or unconsciously 
expressed. "Child Waters" is on the tragic marches; it 
hovers at the brink of that sea of troubles which a major- 
ity of the best ballads are quite willing to face without the 
"happy ending" interposed. This statement can be 
based on statistics. By a rough but apt division, out of 
the three hundred-odd ballads we may call twenty by 
this title of " the happy ending;" with them tragedy is 
averted, but often, as in "The Fair Maid of Northumber- 
land," escape from death is no boon. Often, again, the 
happy ending is unavailing to remove a tragic impression 
which is upon us almost to the final stanza; it is like 
"Measure for Measure," put only by courtesy on the 
"comic" file. The "entertaining" narrative, of course, 
lies between the light things already noted, and these 
semi-tragic pieces which lead up to tragedy pure. There 
are about seventy-five of the chronicle or epic type, which 
includes at once the sterling Robin Hood and other outlaw 
ballads, and also a long list of the poor, the doubtful, 
and the abject ; and there are seventy ballads which may 
be credited, with large use of the word, to romance, 
ranging for scene from a throne to a kitchen, and for 
heroes from King Arthur to Tom Potts. Beyond those 
happy-ending tales, finally, which just avert tragedy at 
their close, is the fiery gate; and through this one goes 
to what is really the citadel. A round hundred of ballads, 
the longest list, are purely and simply tragic; and to these 



340 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

must be added "Otterburn" and "Cheviot" from the 
chronicles. And what a list it is! There is less chaff here 
for the wheat than in the other catalogues; the best, the 
most characteristic, the oldest, the most haunting and 
persuasive ballads are here. Count all the ballads, and 
tragedy is well to the fore; weigh them, and the odds are 
still greater on its side. The combination of tragedy and 
antiquity in the two-line refrain ballads is of great signi- 
ficance. They and the other tragic pieces suggest not 
Wordsworth's definition of poetry at large as "emotion 
recollected in tranquillity," but rather Emerson's account 
of it as the litanies of nations, coming, — 

" Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, 
The canticles of love and woe." 

They echo without comment the clash of man and fate. 
If any lesson is to be learned from them, it is by implica- 
tion : the old lesson that while destiny is inevitable, in- 
exorable, the victim is there neither to whimper nor 
to mock over his plight, but simply to play the man. 
Tragedy, but not pessimism, is their last word. Their 
deepest value is that they revive to some extent the im- 
pression which primitive and communal poetry could 
make by means now impossible for any poet to command. 
They are not primitive verse, — far from it; they are 
crossed and interwoven with the poetry of art, only by 
such support surviving to our day; but they bring with 
them something of the old choral appeal, and still speak, 
however faintly, with the voice of tradition. That is their 



THE HIGHER MOOD 341 

value; and it is not merely the value of a survival. In the 
old Quaker phrase, they speak to the condition of modern 
men and women, and can be counted as a permanent 
possession of the race. Surely there is some common 
poetic ground for the primitive survival in "Babylon" 
and the modern achievement in "Hamlet," different 
as these are, and inferior as one i-s to the other by our 
own standards of taste. The ballad at its best, and the 
great poems of the world, are akin in many ways and 
walk one path. We must judge both of them by their 
relation to poetry in its whole course as a social art, as ex- 
pression, not of yesterday, not of to-day, not of the young 
man in a library, and not of the festal throng, but of the 
rhythmic and emotional elements common to individual 
and mass. In rhythmic instinct the "Babylons" and the 
"Hamlets" are alike, and the degree of excellence is of 
slight account, just as the noblest piece of music has room 
for chorus as well as solo. For the emotional and sym- 
pathetic part, the actual stuff of poetry as distinguished 
from its pattern, the union of ballad and artistic poem 
lies in shadow. But it can be seen. In each case, life 
deepest and strongest is reported at first hand and with 
that high seriousness of which Matthew Arnold had so 
much to say. The main work of civilization for the 
onlooker in life has been to detach the notes of agony, 
misery, grief, weariness, from the notes of fighting, of 
victory and defiance and defeat, and to make literature 
the reflection upon life instead of life itself. Barred from 
this reflective note, the old poetry was devoid of humor. 



342 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

The humorist is left behind ; for comedy, after all, must be 
the affair of prose. The last word of the great poem, like 
that last word of the ballads, expresses life in its tragedy; 
and only the tragic can be finally true. 

The cause of our liking for tragedy, or rather of our 
need of it, has often been discussed; but there is a very 
simple explanation of this need as a craving for truth. 
Day in, day out, it is pleasanter to keep the screen of 
comedy before us, and to take the curtain for the play; 
but to every man come times when he desires to see the 
thing as it is, and what he then sees is tragedy. Comedy 
at its best is the conventional "poetic justice," say of 
"Hind Horn" in balladry and of "As You Like It" in 
art, all things working together for those delightful but 
preposterous pairs. No one wishes to cut the part of our 
comedian or to dismiss the very clown; but it must be 
borne in mind that comedy began in Greece under the 
patronage of Bacchus as a roaring farcical song, a 
phallic revel, and that every "happy ending" is at heart 
a kind of drunkard's paradise in dream. Our very Eng- 
lish word "dream" has curious origins, synonymous once 
with beer. Humor is potent enough, and Pantagruel's 
mood is enviable, certaine gaiete d'esprit, its master 
defines it, confide en mespris des choses fortuites; 1 but 
it does not have that last word which belongs to tragedy 
and echoes in all great verse, echoes even in these humble 

1 Or one may take to heart the motto of the Paris Figaro, quoted of 
course from Beaumarchais : " Je me hate de rire de tout . . . de peur 
d'etre oblige d'en pleurer." 



FINAL ESTIMATE 343 

traditional songs. Cynicism, the recoil of humor upon 
sentiment, ballads never know. Everybody can quote 
Omar's great "forgiveness" stanza; but Heine's climax 
is not so well known. We keep asking, he says, why the 
just suffer, why the evil thrive, keep asking, asking, 
"until at last a handful of earth stops our mouths: but 
is that an answer?" This cannot be the last word, for it 
is mere resignation and protest against the odds. Tragedy 
plays the game, without complaint, and with no thought 
beyond the limits of the scene. Primitive ballads, how- 
ever inadequate they would seem for our needs, came 
from men who knew life at its hardest, faced it, accepted 
it, well aware that a losing fight is at the end of every 
march. A modern writer has pointed out that Germanic 
popular poetry, along with Celtic and Slavic, has always 
loved the beaten cause and echoed the tragedy of life. 
Who, moreover, does not recall that large simplicity in 
which doom is announced, as if to a Greek tragic chorus, 
at the close of the Nibelungen Lay ? Who does not feel 
the same spirit, playing in smaller bounds, at the close of 
"Sir Patrick Spens"? 

Primitive men transcribed their tragic experience by a 
process which psychology may call either gymnastic 
preparation or aesthetic impulse, which Aristotle called 
imitated action, and which, like most human perform- 
ances, really sprang from no conscious purpose but from 
the interplay of social instincts and the conditions of 
earliest social life. Through all the changes due to long 
tradition, through changes of stuff, form, appeal, this 



344 THE WORTH OF THE BALLADS 

primitive way of life still speaks, though with very faint 
and far-away tones, in the ballads. One must make no 
preposterous claim for such survivals as we find in them. 
The majority of them must be classed as inferior poems. 
The best, even, cannot compete with great poems of art; 
but there is a greatness of their own in their attitude 
towards life, in their summary and transcript of it. They 
know T , as the lords of tragedy in Hellas knew, as Shake- 
speare knew, that only the anguish of some inevitable 
conflict is worth while. They know by instinct, as lyric 
poets have known in their "recollected emotion," that 
while tragedy is insoluble, it holds the solution of ex- 
istence in its own mystery, and that only from death 
springs the meaning of life. Without the unfixed but 
certain parting for eternity there could be no human love. 
The ballad does not say these things; far from that. Its 
makers and transmitters would balk at the name of 
tragedy, and would be helpless to understand the greatest 
definition that tragedy has yet found, the close of Milton's 
"Samson Agonistes." But they give the spirit of that 
close in their simple verses, which tell of traffic with 
danger and defeat. They report the battle of life as 
soldiers, not as the captain, with eyes and ears for the 
fighting alone, and no thought of plan and campaign 
and allies and the unseen leader of the foe. That, after 
all, is the main difference. It is no individual that speaks 
out his thoughts, his hopes, his fears, in the ballads. If 
their very name tells of external origin at the communal 
dance, Herder's title for them as Voices of the Nations, 



FINAL ESTIMATE 345 

of the People, goes to their essence and their heart; his 
beautiful dedication remains the best commentary ever 
made upon popular song. The people are now fairly- 
passive in the poetic function; their deputy, the poet, 
acts as lord of verse to the extent of forgetting the suf- 
frages that made him what he is. But ethnology, history, 
and the long career of poetry itself, testify beyond reason- 
able doubt to a time when individuals counted for very 
little in rhythmic expression, and when the choral element 
was over all. A faint echo of this imperious choral can 
still be heard in the ballads, a murmur of voices in con- 
cert, borne over great stretches of space and through 
many changes of time. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

Most of the literature dealing with the "ballad question" is 
recorded, up to the year 1894, in the present writer's Old Eng- 
lish Ballads ; subsequent editions are unchanged. A summary 
of later investigation is made by H. Hecht, "Neuere Literatur 
zur englisch-schottischen Balladendichtung," in Englische 
Studien, xxxvi (1906), 370 ff. The best short discussions of 
the matter are those of G. L. Kittredge, Introduction to the 
one-volume edition of Child's English and Scottish Popular 
Ballads, 1904, and Andrew Lang, new edition Chambers's 
Cyclopaedia of English Literature, 1902, i, 520 ff. Opposed 
to the idea of popular origins are W. J. Courthope, chapter 
on "Decay of English Minstrelsy," in History of English 
Poetry (1895), i, 426 ff.; T. F. Henderson, Scottish Vernacu- 
lar Literature (1898), pp. 355 ff., and new edition of Scott's 
Minstrelsy (1902), Introduction; G. Gregory Smith, The Tran- 
sition Period (1900), pp. 180 ff. — Professor Child's opinions on 
ballads and the ballad have been gathered by W. M. Hart, 
Publications Modern Language Association, xxi (1906), 755 ff. 
— With regard to Auld Maitland (above, pp. 14 f.), Mr. 
Lang now says, Sir Walter Scott, Literary Lives Series, 1906, 
pp. 33 f. : "I lean to a theory that Auld Maitland and the Out- 
law Murray are literary imitations of the ballads, compiled late 
in the seventeenth century, on some Maitland and Murray tra- 
ditions." — For negative conclusions about the Anglo-Saxon 
historical "ballads," see Abegg, Zur Entwickelung der his- 
torischen Dichtung bei den Angelsachsen, Strassburg, 1894. — 
Two papers need special mention in their bearing on the bal- 
lad problem of origins. George Morey Miller, in The Drama- 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 347 

tic Element in the Popular Ballad, University of Cincinnati 
Bulletin, No. 19, has very properly insisted on a closer study 
of the mimetic and dramatic features ; while Arthur Beatty, in 
" The St. George, or Mummers' Plays; a Study in the Protology 
of the Drama," Transactions Wisconsin Acad., xv (1906), 
273 fL, has pointed out the importance of ritual elements in 
popular poetry, and has made noteworthy additions to the 
valuable work of E. K. Chambers in the often cited Mediaeval 
Stage, 2 vols., Oxford, 1903. — A very old and almost unique 
case of Incremental Repetition, the kind familiar in ballads 
and certain tales, occurs in "The Descent of Ishtar," as trans- 
lated into German by Jensen, in Sehrader's Sammlung von 
Assyrischen und Babylonischen Texten, vi, i, Assyrisch-Baby- 
lonische Mythen und Epen, Berlin, 1900, pp. 80-91 : seven sets 
of three verses each describe the spoiling of Ishtar as she passes 
through the seven gates into the underworld, and the process 
is detailed in reversed order at her release. The analogy with 
ballad structure is striking. On page 87 is an interesting case 
of the repetition of a message. 

For the ballads themselves, as set forth in the second chapter, 
Child's great work remains, of course, practically unaffected: 
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ten parts, two to 
a volume, 1882-98, the final part, containing all the appa- 
ratus of investigation, edited by G. L. Kittredge. Work goes 
on, to be sure, with regard to special groups like the Robin 
Hood Cycle; Heusler's Lied und Epos, for example, and the 
dissertation, now in press, of W. M. Hart on Ballad and Epic. 
Gorbing, Anglia, xxiii (1900), 1 ff., "Beispiele von realisierten 
Mythen in den englischen und schottischen Balladen," hardly 
keeps the promise of his title. — An extremely interesting com- 
panion study to Professor Child's various introductions is the 
account and summary of Danish ballads given by Axel Olrik 
in his Danske Folkeviser i Udvalg, Copenhagen, 1899. 



348 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 

For the sources of the ballads, Ewald Fltigel has done good 
work (Anglia, xxi, 312 ff.) zur Chronologie der englischen 
Balladen. Supplementing the list of Sources of the Texts, in 
the fifth volume of Child, compactly given in the one-volume 
edition, pp. 677 ff., Professor Fltigel makes a chronological 
index, from which one easily gathers the facts of the ballad 
record. Judas, in the Trinity Coll. MS., goes back to the thir- 
teenth century; Robin and Gandelyn dates from about 1450, — 
and so do Robin Hood and the Monk and St. Stephen, Robin 
Hood and the Potter following about 1500. Then come the 
Edinburgh printed fragments of the Gest and the edition of 
Wynkyn de Worde. Of sixteenth-century texts may be mentioned 
the printed Adam Bell and the MSS. of Otterburn, Cheviot, 
Captain Car, Sir Andrew Barton. In the seventeenth century 
a few printed ballads are overshadowed by the Percy Folio MS., 
often described, and edited by Hales and Furnivall, 1867-68, 
in 3 vols, and supplement. Percy collected liberally, and his 
Reliques, 1765, in spite of its faults in omission and commission, 
deserved its vogue. The collectors were now in the field, and 
their transcripts, good or bad, along with broadside rescues, 
complete the record. A word should be said in recognition of 
the labors of Mr. Macmath, who helped Professor Child in the 
latest gathering of material; through Mr. Macmath 's zeal 
was recovered what Scott called "the collection of an old lady's 
complete set of ballads." It has furnished valuable readings. 

On the recitation and chanting of ballads, the old love of 
repetition, and the connection of these two phases of balladry, 
may be quoted here some words of Goethe about his way of 
telling stories to children. Werther, of course, cutting bread 
and butter for Lotte's charges, is the poet himself. "Weil 
ich manchmal einen Incidentpunkt erfinden muss, den ich 
beim zweitenmal vergesse, sagen sie [the children] gleich, das 
vorigemal war' es anders gewesen, so dass ich mich jetzt iibe, 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 349 

sie unveranderlich in einem singenden Sylbenfall an einem 
SchnUrchen weg zu recitiren." — In regard to ballad com- 
monplaces, the point of departure for comparison with older 
Germanic formulae is the admirable collection by Sievers at 
the end of his edition of the Heliand, Halle s 1878, pp. 391 ff. 
Fehr's dissertation, Die Formelhajten Elemente in den Alien 
Englischen Balladen, Zossen b. Berlin, 1900, needs continuation 
and elaboration. — In treating the characteristics of the ballad, 
I should have noted the contrast with medieval literature in 
that total ignorance of "examples" which all ballads reveal. 
"What know I of the quene Niobe?" the balladist could cry 
with Troilus; "lat be thine olde ensaumples!" — Little, per- 
haps too little, has been said of the borrowing of narrative 
elements in individual cases; but that subject is endless. Per- 
haps a study of the haphazard statements about more "liter- 
ary" sources would yield good results; for example, when The 
Man of Law says, C. T., B, 132 f., that he got his tale years 
before from "a marchant." But this kind of investigation needs 
no stimulants, and is in good hands. — This mention of Chaucer, 
finally, may serve to remind us that all appreciation of the 
ballads ranges between Professor Child's constant praise for 
the best of them as good stories, told with as much success 
by folk afoot and afield as was attained by his other favorites, 
the pilgrim company on horseback, and the sweep of Herder's 
eulogy in that untranslatable dedication. Behind the splendid 
elegiacs, the appeal for "die Stimme des Volks der zerstreue- 
ten Menschheit " is sufficient shelter for any one who is accused 
of finding qualities in balladry which balladry never knew. 



BALLADS CITED OR QUOTED 



Adam Bell, 186, 269 f., 297, 299. 

Allison Gross, 67, 219. 

Andrew Lammie, 107, 164, 170. 

Archie o' Cawfield, 251. 

Auld Maitland, 14 f. 

Auld Matrons, 269. 

Babylon, or, The Bonny Banks o' 
Fordie, 69, 111 f., 117, 120, 146, 
150, 159, 192, 280, 285, 288, 309, 
324, 336, 341. 

Baffled Knight, The, 232. 

Bailiff's Daughter of Islington, The, 
159. 

Baron of Brackley, The, 185 ff., 211, 
263 f., 325. 

Baron o' Leys, The, 132, 176. 

Battle of Harlaw, The, 253. 

Battle of Otterburn, The, see Otter- 
burn. 

Battle of Philiphaugh, The, 254. 

Beggar-Laddie, The, 164. 

Bent sae Brown, The, 202. 

Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, 116, 208. 

Bewick and Graham, 14, 116, 126, 
167 ff., 295 f., 299. 

Bitter Withy, The, 227 ff., 313. 

Bonnie Annie, 214, 288. 

Bonny Baby Livingston, 161. 

Bonny Banks o' Fordie, The, see 
Babylon. 

Bonny Barbara Allan, 116, 201. 

Bonny Bee Horn, 66, 187, 198. 

Bonny Birdy, The, 179. 

Bonny Earl of Murray, The, 95 f., 208. 

Bonny Hind, The, 192 f. 

Bonny House o' Airlie, The, 239. 

Bonny James Campbell, 46, 95, 208, 
314. 



Bonny John Seton, 254. 

Bonny Lass of Anglesey, 100. 

Bonny Lizie Baillie, 124, 163. 

Bothwell Bridge, 214, 254. 

Boy and the Mantle, The, 231. 

Braes o' Yarrow, The, 191. 

Broom of Cowdenknows, The, 164, 

203. 
Broomfield Hill, The, 232. 
Broughty Wa's, 162. 
Brown Adam, 182, 327 f. 
Brown Girl, The, 201, 302. 
Brown Robin, 157 f. 
Brown Robyn's Confession, 214, 

288. 
Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick, 200. 

Captain Car, or, Edom o' Gordon, 

184 ff., 194, 209, 239, 243, 260, 288, 

330. 
Captain Wedderburn's Courtship, 141. 
Carnal and the Crane, The, 227. 
Cherry-Tree Carol, The, 227. 
Cheviot, 38, 56 ff., 85, 245, 255 ff., 299, 

325 f., 340. 
Chevy Chase, 11, 256 f. 
Child of Ell, The, 151. 
Child Maurice, 43, 73, 130 f., 146, 181, 

294, 303, 309, 328. 
Child Owlet, 179. 
Child Waters, 75, 130, 133 f„ 145, 154, 

204 ff., 305 f., 308, 324, 329, 339. 
Christopher White, 159. 
Clerk Colvill, 130, 173, 198, 217, 309. 
Clerk Saunders, 120, 189, 202. 
Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford, The, 

202 f. 
Coble o' Cargill, The, 200. 
Crafty Farmer, The, 233. 



352 



BALLADS CITED OR QUOTED 



Crow and Pie, 232, 338. 

Cruel Brother, The, 98, 121, 187 f. 

Cruel Mother, The, 171, 306. 

Daemon Lover, The, see James Harris. 
Death of Parcy Reed, The, 213, 252. 
Death of Queen Jane, The, 208, 234. 
Dick o' the Cow, 250, 282. 
Dives and Lazarus, 227. 
Dugall Quin, 164. 
Duke of Athole's Nurse, The, 200. 
Duke of Gordon's Daughter, The, 164. 
Durham Field, 255. 

Earl Bothwell, 238, 255. 

Earl Brand, 147, 151 f. f 173, 297. 

Earl Crawford, 177. 

Earl of Aboyne, The, 176. 

Earl of Errol, The, 180. 

Earl of Mar's Daughter, The, 219. 

Earl of Westmoreland, The, 255. 

Earl Rothes, 189. 

Edom o' Gordon, see Captain Car. 

Edward, 121 f., 144, 171, 173. 

Elfin Knight, The, 139. 

Eppie Morrie, 161. 

Erlinton, 151. 

Fair Annie, 145 f., 155. 

Fair Flower of Northumberland, The, 

12, 74, 154, 339. 
Fair Janet, 173, 202. 
Fair Margaret and Sweet William, 

200 f. 
Fair Mary of Wallington, 193. 
False Lover Won Back, The, 205. 
Famous Flower of Serving-Men, The, 

67, 158. 
Farmer's Curst Wife, The, 233. 
Fause Foodrage, 195. 
Fire of Frendraught, The, 186, 239, 325. 
Flodden Field, 12, 254. 
Friar in the Well, The, 233. 

Gardener, The, 143. 

Gay Goshawk, The, 166, 298, 308. 

Geordie, 11, 186. 



Gest of Robyn Hode, A, see Robin 

Hood. 
Get Up and Bar the Door, 234. 
Gil Brenton, 146, 155 f., 173, 206, 304. 
Glasgerion, 193, 282, 324. 
Glasgow Peggie, 124, 164. 
Glenlogie, 124, 165. 
Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, The, 90, 

217, 298. 
Grey Cock, The, 203, 331. 
Gude Wallace, 51, 131, 254. 
Gypsy Laddie, The, 63, 267. 

Hardyknut, 317. 

Heir of Linne, The, 232. 

Henry Martyn, 237. 

Hind Etin, 218. 

Hind Horn, 118, 146, 165, 230, 294, 

307, 342. 
Hobie Noble, 14, 251 f. 
Hugh Spencer's Feats in France, 90, 

235, 377. 
Hughie Grame, 122, 252. 
Hunting of the Cheviot, The, see 

Cheviot. 

Inter Diabolus et Virgo, 225. 

James Grant, 239. 

James Harris, or, The Daemon Lover, 

119, 182, 215, 222, 235, 302. 
James Hatley, 196. 
Jamie Douglas, 66, 132, 145, 177. 
Jamie Telfer in the Fair Dodhead, 252. 
Jellon Grame, 199, 328. 
Jew's Daughter, The, see Sir Hugh. 
Jocko' the Side, 14,211,251,299,325. 
John Dory, 236 f. 
John of Hazelgreen, 163, 319 f. 
John Thomson and the Turk, 231. 
Johnie Armstrong, 12, 37, 73, 211 ff., 

246, 283, 308. 
Johnie Cock, 174, 267 f., 271 , 298, 302, 

325. 
Johnie Scot, 160. 
Jolly Beggar, The, 164, 233, 338. 
Judas, 225 f., 288. 






BALLADS CITED OR QUOTED 



353 



Katharine Jaffray, 98, 127, 161, 314. 
Keach in the Creel, The, 233, 338. 
Kemp Owyne, 118, 218 f., 298. 
Kempy Kay, 220. 

King Arthur and King Cornwall, 232. 
King Edward IV and a Tanner of 

Tamworth, 12, 232. 
KingEstmere, 147, 154f., 231,299,307. 
King Henry, 220. 
King Henry Fifth's Conquest of 

France, 236. 
King James and Brown, 238. 
King John and the Bishop, 141. 
King Orfeo. 68, 71, 92, 224 f., 291. 
King's Dochter Lady Jean, The, 192. 
Kinmont Willie, 27, 62, 251, 314. 
Kitchie-Boy, The, 165. 
Knight and Shepherd's Daughter, The, 

203. 
Knight's Ghost, The, 160. 
Knight of Liddesdale, The, 177. 

Lads of Wamphray, The, 57, 249. 

Lady Alice, 116, 201 

Lady Diamond, 165. 

Lady Elspat, 164. 

Lady Isabel, 175. 

Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, 68, 

70,98, 121, 147, 152 f. 
Lady Maisry, 122, 124, 130, 189, 202. 
Lady of Arngosk, The, 162 f. 
Laily Worm, The, 67, 175, 219. 
Laird o' Logie, The, 238. 
Laird of Wariston, The, 238. 
Lamkin, 103, 132, 194 f., 303. 
Lang Johnny More, 160, 303. 
Lass of Roch Royal, The, 87, 174. 
Leesome Brand, 193. 
Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, 

128, 179, 301, 327. 
Lizie Lindsay, 164. 
Lizie Wan, 192. 
Lochmaben Harper, The, 250. 
Lord Delamere, 119, 235. 
Lord Derwentwater, 211 f. 
Lord Ingram and Chiel Wyet, 126, 

190 f., 308. 



Lord Lovel, 67, 90, 200, 305. 

Lord Maxwell's Last Good-Night, 

211 f. 
Lord of Lorn, The, 197. 
Lord Randal, 117, 144, 173, 200, 324. 
Lord Saltoun and Auchanachie, 170. 
Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 125, 

173, 200, 307, 326. 
Lord Thomas and Lady Margaret, 200. 
Lord William, or, Lord Lundy, 161. 
Loudon Hill, 254. 

Maid and the Palmer, The^77, 226. 
Maid Freed from the Gallows, The, 98, 

101 ff., 111,117, 120, 144, 147,285, 

287,296, 313. 
Marriage of Sir Gawain, The, 232. 
Mary Hamilton. 67, 104, 129, 213, 

239 ff., 243, 260, 288, 325. 
Mermaid, The, 125. 
Mother's Malison, The, 87, 145, 174. 
Musselburgh Field, 255. 

Northumberland Betrayed by Doug- 
las, 255. 

Nut-Brown Maid, The, 12 f., 15, 203 f., 
263. 

Old Robin of Portingale, 179, 303. 
Otterburn, 38, 56 ff., 85, 241, 247, 

255 ff., 284, 288, 301, 330, 340. 
Our Goodman, 103, 177 f., 233. 
Outlaw Murray, The, 211. 

Prince Heathen, 90, 205, 306. 
Prince Robert, 172. 
Proud Lady Margaret, 141. 

Queen Eleanor's Confession, 234, 248. 
Queen of Elfan's Nourice, The, 35, 

325. 
Queen of Scotland, The, 179. 

Rantin Laddie, The, 176. 
Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow, 192. 
Redesdale and Wise William, 182. 
Richie Story, 165. 



354 



BALLADS CITED OR QUOTED 



Riddles Wisely Expounded, 138. 
Rising in the North, The, 66, 255. 
Rob Roy, 163. 

Robin Hood, The Birth of, 128. 
Robin Hood, A Gest of, 4, 39, 78, 85, 

241, 270 ff., 280, 283 f., 332, 336. 
Robin Hood, A True Tale of, 276. 
Robin Hood and the Beggar, 275. 
Robin Hood and the Bishop of Here- 
ford, 275. 
Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, 

105, 114, 271, 274, 277, 280 f., 309, 

337. 
Robin Hood and the Monk, 114, 246, 

270, 274, 277 f., 281 f., 325, 330. 
Rot>in Hood and the Potter, 274, 277, 

309. 
Robin Hood newly Revived, 275. 
Robin Hood's Death, 144, 274, 279 f., 

335. 
Robyn and Gandeleyn, 67, 268, 271. 
Rose of England, The, 4, 236. 
Rose the Red and White Lily, 158, 175. 

St. Stephen and Herod, 226, 228, 325. 
Sheath and Knife, 84, 192, 331. 
Sir Aldingar, 53 f., 195 f., 299, 303. 
Sir Andrew Barton, 90, 121, 237, 300, 

330. 
SirCawline, 231, 302. 
Sir Hugh, 68, 127, 229 f., 279. 
Sir James the Rose, 200. 
Sir John Butler, 175. 
Sir Lionel, 118, 231. 
Sir Patrick Spens, 69, 128 f., 210, 301, 

324, 327, 330, 333, 343. 
Slaughter of the Laird of Mellerstain, 

The, 209. 
Suffolk Miracle, The, 222. 
Sweet Trinity, The, 237. 
Sweet William's Ghost, 201, 221, 235, 

302. 



Tarn Lane (or Lin), 27, 62, 216, 298, 

315. 
Thomas Rymer, 15, 215 f., 302, 329. 
Three Ravens, The, 187, 197. 
Tom Potts, 158, 165, 301, 339. 
Trooper and Maid, 199. 
Twa Brothers, The, 107, 117, 122 f., 

142, 296, 325. 
Twa Knights, The, 184, 300. 
Twa Magicians, The, 142, 300. 
Twa Sisters, The, 75, 189 f., 282, 

301. 

Unquiet Grave, The, 201, 220. 

Walter Lesly, 161 f. 

Wee, Wee Man, The, 220. 

White Fisher, The, 173. 

Wife of Usher's Well, The, 127, 144, 

222 f., 248, 302, 313 f., 324. 
Wife Wrapt in Wether's Skin, The, 233. 
Will Stewart and John, 155, 308. 
Willie and Earl Richard's Daughter, 

128, 158. 
Willie and Lady Maisry, 202, 308. 
Willie Mackintosh, 210. 
Willie o' Douglas Dale, 165, 306 f. 
Willie o' Winsbury, 160. 
Willie's Lady, 157, 173. 
Willie's Lyke-Wake, 166. 
Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie, The, 

203. 

Young Allan, 211. 
Young Andrew, 67, 153. 
Young Beichan, 67, 212, 230. 
Young Benjie, 199. 
Young Hunting, 198 f., 298 ff. 
Young Johnstone, 200, 309. 
Young Peggy, 164. 
Young Ronald, 160, 316. 
Young Waters, 208, 316. 



INDEX 



Addison, 256. 

Adultery, 177 ff. 

Agincourt, songs on, 261. 

Aldhelm, 245. 

Allingham, 222, 314. 

Alliteration, 56, 262, 280, 304 f., 308, 

326. 
Anglo-Saxon ballads, 34 f. 
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 33. 
Anglo-Saxon didactic, 136. 
Anglo-Saxon epic, 36 ff., 42 f. 
Anglo-Saxon poetry, 39, 42, 59, 260. 
Anglo-Saxon riddles, 136. 
Anglo-Saxon verse, 34. 
Anrchkof, 45. 
Aristocratic personages, 82, 307 f., 

309; as types, 308. 
Aristotle, 14, 20, 181. 
Arnold, M., 72, 307. 
Arthur, 52, 272. 
Arval Hymn, 93 f. 
Aube, the, 203, 331. 
Aubrey, J., 9, 207, 299. 

Bacon, 322. 

Ballad, the, ambiguous word, 3 ff., 
32; of art, 13, 319, 333; as degener- 
ate art, 62 ff.; defined, 2, 75, 284 f., 
321, 337 f.; earliest English record 
of, 58; elements of, 29; and epic, 
36 f., 266 ff.; forgery of, 314 ff., 
318; imitations of, 314 ff., 319; 
improvements of, 315; as journal- 
ism (q. v.), 4f., 10 ff.; making of, 
61, 75 f., 284, 310; metre of, 31, 
60, 261, 263, 325 f.; the passing of, 
313; in print, 4ff.; problem of, 
14 ff., 26 f., 28, 61 ff.; structure of , 
42, 58, 60, 71 ff., 79, 85 ff., 126, 131; 



style of, centripetal, 325 f.; sum- 
mary of, 337 ff.; transmitted by 
women, 9, 49; vocabulary of, limited, 
326. 

Ballads, the, age of, 30 f.; of battle, 
253 ff.; of the border, 56 f., 243 ff.; 
characters in, 81, 114, 241, 272, 309 f., 
336 f.; coincidence or derivation 
in, 295; community of narrative in, 
68 ff., 288 ff.; dialogue in,83f.; of 
domestic complication, 145 ff.; of" 
elopement, 155 ff., 161 ff.; folklore 
in, 299 ff.; fusion of, 310; of the 
greenwood, 266 ff., 293; Germanic, 
36; grouping of, 135, 337 f.; in 
histories, 49 ff.; inclusions and 
exclusions of, 15 f.; of jealousy, 
177 ff.; of kinship, 169 ff.; lack of 
comment and reflection in, 337, 
341 f.; lack of cynicism in, 343; lack 
of humor in, 341; lack of religion in, 
337; lack of sentiment in, 170, 320, 
343; nature in, 277, 328 ff.; oldest, 
the, 135 ff.; used for plays, 103, 
105 f.; political, 32; sources of, 29 f., 
286 ff., 310; statistics of, 338 ff.; 
of the street, 4, 13; tests of, 15 f.; 
texts of the, 80, 267; worth of, 
322 ff. 

Bannockburn, songs on, 55 f. 

Barbour, J., 31, 49. 

Basques, the, 23. 

Beatty, A., 45, 94. 

Beaumont and Fletcher, 180, 201. 

Bedier, J., 140, 290. 

Beowulf, 39 ff., 46, 184, 273, 303 f., 
329. 

Birds, agency of, 153, 166, 199, 294, 
298, 302. 



356 



INDEX 



Births in the forest, 193. 

Blake, W., 72. 

Blind Harry, 51. 

Blond as the ballad type of beauty, 

307. 
Bluebeard, 154. 

Border, ballads of the, 56 f., 243 ff. 
Borrow, G., 23. 

Borrowing from ballad to ballad, 289 ff . 
Botocudos, the, 135. 
Boynton on refrain, 278. 
Brandl, A., 267. 
Broadsides (see Journalism), 159, 215, 

222, 238, 257, 276. 
Brother, the, 183 f., 188 ff. ; and 

brother, 190; and sister 189, 192 f., 

202. 
Brown, Mrs., of Falkland, 216 f., 313. 
Brunanburh, song on, 34, 50. 
Brunne, Robert, 7. 
Buchan, P., 15, 301, 316. 
Bugge, S., 70, 153. 
Burden, see Refrain. 
Burlesque, 124 f. 
Burns, 62, 73, 201, 314 f. 

Cante-fable, the, 107. 

Carols, 227. 

Celtic songs, 311. 

Chambers, E. K., 45, 83, 106, 149. 

Chanting, 247. 

Characters, see Ballads. 

Charms, 301. 

Chaucer, 32, 47, 204, 229 f., 244, 259, 
305. 

Chettle, H., 5. 

Child, F. J., his collection, 14 f., 29, 
135; his definition of ballads, 15; 
on derivation and distribution, 124; 
on inclusion and exclusion, 160; 
his introductions, 292 f., 297; his 
obiter dicta, 325; on rhythm of 
ballads, 263; on statistics as sus- 
picions, 81; his views and sum- 
maries of the various ballads, 51, 
129, 152, 204, 232, 239, 272, 280, 
etc. 



Childe Harold, 211, 280. 

Chivalry, 259. 

Choice of color, or sequence of colors, 

88, 121, 129, 188, 240, 306, 308. 
Choice of ring or brand, 300. 
Choice of three, 129 f., 236, 306. 
Choral verse, 19, 36, 44 ff., 52, 59 f., 

76 f., 80, 83, 91, 100, 108, 147 f., 164, 

287, 311, 340. 
Chrestien de Troyes, 204. 
Christ and His Mother, 116. 
Chronicle ballads, 243 ff., 265, 339. 
Cnut's song, 58 f., 249. 
Comfort, W. W., 208. 
Comitatus, 299. 
Commonplaces, 127 ff., 142, 158 f., 

264 f., 279, 282, 298, 304 ff. 
Communal poetry, 19, 43, 54, 75, 

331 f., 345. 
Complaynt of Scotland, The, 47, 246, 

253. 
Convention in ballads, 305 ff., 324 f., 

332. 
Coronachs, 207 f. 
Corsican ballati, 95. 
Cosquin, E., 290. 
Covenanters, the, 253 f. 
Cox, Captain, 12. 
Cries, three, 121. 
Croyland, chronicle of, 49. 
Cumulative songs, 103, 139. 

Dance, ballads of the, 97 f., 245 f.; at 
funerals, 95, 207, 246; as source of 
ballads, 10, 14, 24, 44, 47, 59, 72, 91, 
98 f., 100, 105 ff., 117, 137 f., 140 f ., 
147 f., 311. 

Daughter, the, 175. 

Davidson, Dr. T., 143. 

Death not emphasized, 283, 309, 
337. 

Deloney, T., 12 f., 254. 

Dialogue, 83 f., 101. 

Didactic, 136. 

Douglas, Gawin, 47. 

Dramatic .elements, 92, 97, 100, 119, 
123, 164, 166, 178. 



INDEX 



357 



Dream-opening, 67. 

Dreams, 301. 

Dress, color of. 129. 132, SOS f. 



7Sf., 83, 92. 135. 



Eoiae, 79. 

16 f., 42 f.. 

270. 2S4. 
Epic methods. 335 f. 
Epic preface. 92 f. 
Epic process, 79 ff. f 109 f.. 115 f., 141, 

147, 150, 243. 260. 266. 270. 291. 
Ethnological evidence, 21 ff. 

Fab van's chronicle. 55. 
Fairy ballads. 215 ff. 
Faroe Islands, ballads in the. 24. 26. 
69, 105. 107. 109. 146 f., 150, 263. 
Father, the. 173. 
Figurative language. 72. 327 f. 
Flytings. 55. 137 f.. 143. 
Folklore in ballads, 299 ff. 
Folk song. 66. 
Fontenelle. 1. 
Forgery, see Ballad. 
Frankish ballad. 4S f. 
Frazer. J. G.. 45. 94. 
Fulk Fitz-Warine. 8. 
Funeral songs. 46. 95. 
Furnivall, F. J.. 207. 

Games, SO. 10S f. 

German ballad in England, 294, 

Germanic ballads. 36. 293, 343. 

Gerould. G. H.. 225. 

Ghosts. 200. 220 ff., 301 f. 

Goldsmith. 322. 

Good-nights. 211 ff., 252. 

is, 44. 46. 
Gray. 73. 151. 
Greek ballads, modern. 172. 
Greenwood ballads. 266 ff. 
Grundtvig. 15. 60, 100, 204, 293. 
Ghienillon, 150. 

Hales. J. W.. 255. 
Halewijn, 124. 154. 
Happy ending. 339. 



Hardy. T., 9, 248. 
Harpers Kraft. 70. 
Hart. W. M.. 267. 325. 
Hebrew ballads, 45. 
Heine, 171. 179. 195. 

Izy of. 221. 
Henderson. T. F.. 16, 192. 317. 
Henley. W. E.. 63. 
Henry of Huntingdon. 50. 
Herd. D.. 313. 
Herder. 17 f.. 344 f. ■ 
Hereward. ballads of. 30. 49 f.. 274. 
Herford. C. H., 293. 
Hero and Leard^, 56 ff., 92. 223 f. 
Heusler. A.. 263. 

s -d dialect, 254. 
Hilde saga. 151. 
Hildebrand and Hilde. 151, 
History perverted. 234. 
Holstein dances, 97 f., 139 f.. 147 f. 
Humor. 177 f.. 233 f.. 251 f., 341 f. 
Husband and wife, 176 ff. 

"I," the. of ballads. 66 f. 

Icelandic saga. 113. 

Imitations. 314. 

Impersonal quality. 66. 257. 

Impossible things. 139 f., 142, 291. 

Imprecation. 144 f. 

Improvisation. 14. 22. 24 f.. 45. 58 ff., 

73 5., 101. 249 f., 260, 257; by 

warriors. 37. 40 f.. 57. 
Incest, 192. 

Incremental, see Repetition. 
Indecent ballads. 65. 203, 232 f., 335 f. 
Informers, 197. 

Jacobs. J.. 107. 

Jealousy, ballads of, 177. 159 f. 
Jeanroy. 140. 
John of Bridlington. 52. 
John of Ireland. 323. 
Johnson. Dr.. 73. 283. 256. 337. 
Jordanis. 46. 

Journalism, 4. 10. 13. 32 f., 40. 52 f., 
56. 235: degenerate. 159, 235. 261. 
Judith and Holofernes, 153, 335. 



358 



INDEX 



Ker, W. P., 36, 69, 266 f., 336. 
Kinship, 166 ff . 
Kipling, R., 14, 333 f. 
Kittredge, G. L., 8 f., 39, 75, 101, 232, 
266, 267, 287. 

Labor, chorals of, 45. 

Lang, A., 14 f ., 57, 239, 242, 248, 289 L, 

315. 
Lang, H. R., 141. 
Layamon, 51 f. 

Leaping and lingering, 91, 117, 283. 
Legacy formula, 121, 144, 172. 188 f., 

213. 
Legend, sacred, 225 ff. 
Lenore, 222. 
Leslie, Bishop, 57. 
Liden Kirstins Dans, 100 f. 
Light, supernatural, 302 f. 
Limburger Chronicle, 32 f . 
Lowth, 48. 
Lyric, 34 f., 47, 116,331. 

Macmath, 313. 

Magic (see also Charms), 142, 153, 156, 

204, 303. 
Maid Marian, 271. 
Maldon Fight, 34, 260, 263. 
Marie de France, 146. 
Meier, John, 27, 62 f. 
Meredith, G., 14; his Attila compared 

with ballads, 333 f. 
Mermaids, 210, 217, 301. 
Metre, see Ballad. 
Metrical tales, 232. 
Minot, Laurence, 55 f., 259. 
Minstrel, the, 4, 6, 8, 37, 40, 50 f., 66; 

and ballads, 8 ff., 32, 54, 137, 231, 

255, 259, 263. 
Minstrel ballads, 231 ff., 254. 
Montaigne, 2. 
Mother, the, 171 f.; more important 

than father, 173. 
Mother-in-law, 172 ff. 
Miillenhoff, 21, 149, 297. 
Murray, Dr., 15. 
Myth, 94 f., 293, 298, 302, 328. 



Naming, 152. 

Narrative, 68, 82, 89 f., 115, 338. 
Nashe, T., 3 f. 
Nature in ballads, 328 ff. 
Nature-opening, 277 f. 
Neilson, W. A., 254. 
Neocorus, 97, 107. 
Nilus og Hillelille, 183 f. 
Nithart, 99. 

Nut-Brown Maid, The, 13, 15, 203 f„ 
263. 

Oaths, 199, 299. 

Old Lady's MS., 164, 219, 233. 

Ordeal, 199, 299. 

Ossian, 311. 

Outlaw, the, 267 f., 272 f. 

Pages, 306. 

Paris, G., 36, 81, 182, 289. 

Peacock, T. L., 257. 

Percy, Bishop, 30, 313; his folio, 

315. 
Permission, asking, 87, 98, 188. 
Piers Plowman, 30 f., 53, 272 f. 
Poetry, 18 ff . 
Ponts-neufs, 4. 

"Popular," 3, 14 ff., 320 f., 322. 
Popular tale, 69, 109, 141. 
Popular verse, 25, 31. 
Portents, 301. 
Prayer, final, 244, 280. 
Primitive verse, 21. 
Priority of epic, lyric, drama, 21. 

Radloff, 22, 137. 

Randolph, Earl, 7, 30, 50, 273 f. 

Rauf C oily ear, 232. 

Recitation, 244, 270, 332. 

Refrain, 34, 36, 44, 48, 54, 56, 74 f., 76, 

84, 91, 100, 111, 133 f., 148, 156, 268, 

278, 320, 330. 
Relative-climax, 98, 102 f., 104, 120, 

123 f., 165, 189, 194, 296. 
Renaud, 130. 
Repetition, 42,86,88,93 f., 116, 133 f., 

166, 282, 323. 



INDEX 



359 



Repetition, incremental, 90 ff., 95, 98, 
100, 104, 113, 116 ff., 123, 127, 133 f., 
155 f., 178, 205, 223 ff., 249 f., 253, 
268 f., 280, 282, 300, 329; three 
forms of, 120 ff.; burlesque of, 124 f.; 
statistics of, 134. 

Rhapsode, 270. See Minstrel. 

Rhythm, 80, 247, 323 f., 341. 

Ribold og Guldborg, 151. 

Riddle, 96, 135 ff., 291. 

Rime, 73, 326. 

Ritson, J., 314. 

Ritual, songs of, 43, 45, 93 f., 271. 

Robin Hood, 114 f., 272, 275 f., 336; 
plays of, 105 f., 271; ballads of, 5, 
12, 30, 56, 81, 115, 245, 266 ff., 274, 
299, 338. 

Roland, 10, 37. 

Romances, ballads from, 197, 216, 230. 

Romantic ballads, 145 f., 151, 155, 
165 f., 230 f., 319 f., 330, 339. 

Rondeau, 140. 

Rousseau, 3. 

Russian ballads, 172. 

Saga, Icelandic, 33, 69. 

St. George Plays, 94, 123. 

Salomon and Saturn, 136, 303. 

Satire, 52 f. 

Scandinavian ballads, 146, 151. 

Schofield, W. H., 255. 

Schrader, Prof., 172. 

Scott, 27, 62, 163, 247, 251, 313 ff., 319. 

Scott's Minstrelsy, 319 ; new ed., 16. 

Sea-ballads, 214, 237. 

Selden, 7, 11. 

Sentiment, 170 f., 320. 

Servant, the, 193 ff. 

Shakespeare, 3, 10, 259. 

Sharpe, C. K., 162. 

Sheale, R., 38, 262 f. 

Siberia, ballads in, 22 f., 137 f. 

Sidgwick, F., 228. 

Sievers, R., 12 f. 

Simplicity, 72 f. 

Simrock, 295. 

Sing and say, 245. 



Singing, 71, 74, 159, 276. 

Sir Henry (Scand.), 148 f., 154. 

Sir Hugh le Blond, 196. 

Sister, the, 182 f., 189 f. 

Sister's son, 121, 125, 183 f., 200. 

Situation-ballads, 82, 85 ff., 92, 110, 

113 f., 195,271, 278 f., 336. 
Skelton, 4. 
Sociology, 21. 
Sources, problem of, 288 ff . 
Split situation, 90. 
Springeltanz, 97 f. 
Stanza, interlaced, 250, 261, 282. 
Statistics in ballads, 81, 264. 
Stepmother, the, 175. 
Stev, 26. 

Stewart, J. A., 302. 
Stolen bride, the, 145 ff.; variants of, 

147, 161 ff. 
Stornelli, 26. 
Structure, see Ballads. 
Supernatural elements, 141, 147, 152 ff., 

182, 214 ff., 298 f. 
Survivals of early verse, 22. 
Sword-dance, 149. 
Swords, 303 f., 307. 
Sworn brethren, 167, 269, 299. 

T&rningspillet, 118. 

Taine, 323, 333. 

Tennyson, 124, 247; The Revenge, 
333; Morte d' Arthur, 335. 

Text, 80, 267, 312. 

Thomas of Erceldoune, 52. 

Tradition, 30 f., 38, 40, 60 ff., 286 f., 
293, 310 ff.; opposed to journalism, 
33; corruption in, 63. 

Tragedy, 166 ff., 181, 188, 192, 202, 
217, 283, 295, 339 ff.; why the fa- 
vorite, 342. 

Tragemund, 137. 

Transformation, 143, 216 f., 218 ff., 
298. 

True-loves, 197 ff. 

Tupper, F., Jr., 136. 

Uhland, 137, 140, 222. 



360 



INDEX 



U linger, 121. 
Usener, H., 60. 

Valdemar og Tove, 157. 
Versus memoriales, 136. 
Vocero, 95, 208 f. 

Wallace, 51. 
Waltharius, 183. 
Walton, Isaak, 1. 
Waly, Waly, 132, 177. 
War, chorals of, 44 f., 55. 
Warriors, songs of, 37, 40 f., 
259 f. 



57, 81, 



Warton, 54. 

Weddings, ballads of, 45, 140. 

Whimzies, 5. 

Widsith, 40, 52, 136. 

Wiener, L., 294. 

Wife, the, 171, 182, 184 ff., 187. 

Wife's Complaint, The, 34 f. 

William of Malmesbury, 50 f., 53, $95, 

245. 
Woden, 152. 
Women and ballads, 5, 8f,, 48, 55, 

207. 
Wordsworth, 247. 
Wright, T., 52, 261. 



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